Handling climate-important cumulus cloud models, regardless of scale
Friday, April 17, 2015 - 07:00
in Earth & Climate
Even as computing power increases, current climate model formulas struggle to handle storm clouds at today's higher resolutions and smaller model grid sizes. Cumulus storm cloud systems are still only partially resolved. Armed with a new formula developed by a research team led by Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, scientists can now represent cumulus in grid sizes as fine as 2 kilometers to as coarse as 256 kilometers. The team's approach breaks the storm cloud gridlock by more accurately depicting how cumulus clouds transport moisture through the atmosphere.