Effects of Resolution on the Simulation of Boundary-layer Clouds and the Partition of Kinetic Energy to Subgrid Scales

• Main Authors: Anning Cheng, Kuan-Man Xu, Bjorn Stevens
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: American Geophysical Union (AGU) 2010-02-01
• Series: Journal of Advances in Modeling Earth Systems
• Subjects: Simulation of boundary-layer clouds; resolution dependence; turbulence kinetic energy
• Online Access: http://james.agu.org/index.php/JAMES/article/view/v2n3

Seven boundary-layer cloud cases are simulated with UCLA-LES (The University of California, Los Angeles – large eddy simulation) model with different horizontal and vertical gridspacing to investigate how the results depend on gridspacing. Some variables are more sensitive to horizontal gridspacing, while others are more sensitive to vertical gridspacing, and still others are sensitive to both horizontal and vertical gridspacings with similar or opposite trends. For cloud-related variables having the opposite dependence on horizontal and vertical gridspacings, changing the gridspacing proportionally in both directions gives the appearance of convergence. In this study, we mainly discuss the impact of subgrid-scale (SGS) kinetic energy (KE) on the simulations with coarsening of horizontal and vertical gridspacings. A running-mean operator is used to separate the KE of the high-resolution benchmark simulations into that of resolved scales of coarse-resolution simulations and that of SGSs. The diagnosed SGS KE is compared with that parameterized by the Smagorinsky-Lilly SGS scheme at various gridspacings. It is found that the parameterized SGS KE for the coarse-resolution simulations is usually underestimated but the resolved KE is unrealistically large, compared to benchmark simulations. However, the sum of resolved and SGS KEs is about the same for simulations with various gridspacings. The partitioning of SGS and resolved heat and moisture transports is consistent with that of SGS and resolved KE, which means that the parameterized transports are underestimated but resolved-scale transports are overestimated. On the whole, energy shifts to large-scales as the horizontal gridspacing becomes coarse, hence the size of clouds and the resolved circulation increase, the clouds become more stratiform-like with an increase in cloud fraction, cloud liquid-water path and surface precipitation; when coarse vertical gridspacing is used, cloud sizes do not change, but clouds are produced less frequently. Cloud fraction and liquid water path decrease.