Impact of Parameterized Physical Processes on Simulated Tropical Cyclone Characteristics in the Community Atmosphere Model

Abstract

Abstract This study advances the understanding of how parameterized physical processes affect the development of tropical cyclones (TCs) in the Community Atmosphere Model (CAM) using the Reed–Jablonowski TC test case. It examines the impact of changes in 24 parameters across multiple physical parameterization schemes that represent convection, turbulence, precipitation, and cloud processes. The one-at-a-time (OAT) sensitivity analysis method quantifies the relative influence of each parameter on TC simulations and identifies which parameters affect six different TC characteristics: intensity, precipitation, longwave cloud radiative forcing (LWCF), shortwave cloud radiative forcing (SWCF), cloud liquid water path (LWP), and ice water path (IWP). It is shown that TC intensity is mainly sensitive to the parcel fractional mass entrainment rate (dmpdz) in deep convection. A decrease in this parameter can lead to a change in simulated intensity from a tropical depression to a category-4 storm. Precipitation and SWCF are strongly affected by three parameters in deep convection: tau (time scale for consumption rate of convective available potential energy), dmpdz, and C0_ocn (precipitation coefficient). Changes in physical parameters generally do not affect LWCF much. In contrast, LWP and IWP are very sensitive to changes in C0_ocn. The changes can be as large as 10 (5) times the control mean value for LWP (IWP). Further examination of the response functions for the subset of most sensitive parameters reveals nonlinear relationships between parameters and most output variables, suggesting that linear perturbation analysis may produce misleading results when applied to strongly nonlinear systems.