Scientists determine which modeling parameters are most influential in simulating clouds

Monday, October 13, 2014 - 07:00 in Earth & Climate

Like building a high-performance engine, the components you add to a climate model determine the quality of the finished product. A new study led by Pacific Northwest National Laboratory looked for which "tunable" variables were most influential in depicting various cloud types in a global atmospheric model. They found that different parameters influenced different types of clouds. For stratocumulus, low and clumpy clouds, the parameters that matter most appear in water and heat flux equations. For shallow cumulus, cotton-ball-like low clouds, the most influential parameters are those related to how the atmospheric vertical velocity is skewed. The study was published in the Journal of Advances in Modeling Earth Systems.

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