Modeling of clouds and radiation for developing parameterizations for general circulation models. Annual report, 1994

We are using a hierarchy of numerical models of cirrus and stratus clouds and radiative transfer to improve the reliability of general circulation models. Our detailed cloud microphysical model includes all of the physical processes believed to control the lifecycle of liquid and ice clouds in the troposphere. In our one-dimensional cirrus studies, we find that the ice crystal number and size in cirrus clouds are not very sensitive to the number of condensation nuclei which are present. We have compared our three-dimensional meoscale simulations of cirrus clouds with radar, lidar satellite and other observations of water vapor and cloud fields and find that the model accurately predicts the characteristics of a cirrus cloud system. The model results reproduce several features detected by remote sensing (lidar and radar) measurements, including the appearance of the high cirrus cloud at about 15 UTC and the thickening of the cloud at 20 UTC. We have developed a new parameterizations for production of ice crystals based on the detailed one-dimensional cloud model, and are presently testing the parameterization in three-dimensional simulations of the FIRE-II November 26 case study. We have analyzed NWS radiosonde humidity data from FIRE and ARM and found errors, biases, and uncertainties in the conversion of the sensed resistance to humidity