Modeling microphysical effects of entrainment in clouds observed during EUCAARI-IMPACT field campaign

Abstract

Abstract. This paper discusses aircraft observations and large-eddy simulation (LES) of the 15 May 2008, North Sea boundary-layer clouds from the EUCAARI-IMPACT field campaign. These clouds were advected from the north-east by the prevailing lower-tropspheric winds, and featured stratocumulus-over-cumulus cloud formations. Almost-solid stratocumulus deck in the upper part of the relatively deep weakly decoupled marine boundary layer overlaid a field of small cumuli with a cloud fraction of ~10%. The two cloud formations featured distinct microphysical characteristics that were in general agreement with numerous past observations of strongly-diluted shallow cumuli on the one hand and solid marine boundary-layer stratocumulus on the other. Macrophysical and microphysical cloud properties were reproduced well by the double-moment warm-rain microphysics large-eddy simulation. A novel feature of the model is its capability to locally predict homogeneity of the subgrid-scale mixing between the cloud and its cloud-free environment. In the double-moment warm-rain microphysics scheme, the homogeneity is controlled by a single parameter α, that ranges from 0 to 1 and limiting values representing the homogeneous and the extremely inhomogeneous mixing scenarios, respectively. Parameter α depends on the characteristic time scales of the droplet evaporation and of the turbulent homogenization. In the model, these scales are derived locally based on the subgrid-scale turbulent kinetic energy, spatial scale of cloudy filaments, the mean cloud droplet radius, and the humidity of the cloud-free air entrained into the cloud. Simulated mixing is on average quite inhomogeneous, with the mean parameter α around 0.7 across the entire depth of the cloud field, but with local variations across almost the entire range, especially near the base and the top of the cloud field.