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Unified Treatment of Thermodynamic and Optical Variability in a Simple Model of Unresolved Low Clouds

American Meteorological Society

Comparative studies of global climate models have long shown a marked sensitivity to the parameterization of cloud properties. Early attempts to quantify this sensitivity were hampered by diagnostic schemes that were inherently biased toward the contemporary climate. Recently, prognostic cloud schemes based on an assumed statistical distribution of subgrid variability replaced the older diagnostic schemes in some models. Although the relationship between unresolved variability and mean cloud amount is known in principle, a corresponding relationship between ice-free low cloud thermodynamic and optical properties is lacking. The authors present a simple, analytically tractable statistical optical depth parameterization for boundary layer clouds that links mean reflectivity and emissivity to the underlying distribution of unresolved fluctuations in model thermodynamic variables. To characterize possible impacts of this parameterization on the radiative budget of a large-scale model, they apply it to a zonally averaged climatology, illustrating the importance of a coupled treatment of subgrid-scale condensation and optical variability. They derive analytic expressions for two response functions that characterize two potential low cloud feedback scenarios in a warming climate. Copyright 2003 American Meteorological Society (AMS). Permission to use figures, tables, and brief excerpts from this work in scientific and educational works is hereby granted provided that the source is acknowledged. Any use of material in this work that is determined to be “fair use” under Section 107 of the U.S. Copyright Act or that satisfies the conditions specified in Section 108 of the U.S. Copyright Act (17 USC §108, as revised by P.L. 94-553) does not require the AMS’s permission. Republication, systematic reproduction, posting in electronic form, such as on a web site or in a searchable database, or other uses of this material, except as exempted by the above statement, requires written permission or a license from the AMS. Additional details are provided in the AMS Copyright Policy, available on the AMS Web site located at (http://www.ametsoc.org/) or from the AMS at 617-227-2425 or copyright@ametsoc.org.

Text

2016-11-07

Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International

http://hdl.handle.net/2429/32956

Jeffery, Christopher A., Austin, Philip H. 2003. Unified Treatment of Thermodynamic and Optical Variability in a Simple Model of Unresolved Low Clouds. Journal of the Atmospheric Sciiences 60(13) 1621–1631.

Reviewed

Austin Philip H.

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