Evolution of a storm-driven cloudy boundary layer in the Arctic

The cloudy boundary layer under stormy conditions during the summertime Arctic has been studied using observation from the SHEBA experiment and large-eddy simulations (LES). On 29 July 1998, a stable Arctic cloudy boundary layer event was observed after passage of a synoptic low. The local dynamic and thermodynamic structure of the boundary layer was determined from aircraft measurement including analysis of turbulence, cloud microphysics and radiative properties. After the upper cloud layer advected over the existing cloud layer, the turbulent kinetic energy budget indicated that the cloud layer below 200 m was maintained predominantly by shear production. Observations of longwave radiation showed that cloud top cooling at the lower cloud top has been suppressed by radiative effects of the upper cloud layer. Our LES results demonstrate the importance of the combination of shear mixing near the surface and radiative cooling at the cloud top in the storm-driven cloudy boundary layer. Once the low-level cloud reaches a certain height, depending on the amount of cloud-top cooling, the two sources of TKE production begin to separate in space under continuous stormy conditions, suggesting one possible mechanism for the cloud layering. The sensitivity tests suggest that the storm-driven cloudy boundary layer is flexibly switched to the shear-driven system due to the advection of upper clouds or the buoyantly driven system due to the lack of the wind shear. A comparison is made of this storm-driven boundary layer with the buoyantly driven boundary layer previously described in the literature