A layer of intensive mixing (entrainment interface layer, [EIL]) at the top of marine stratocumulus under a strong inversion has been investigated with 10 cm resolution using an ultrafast thermometer (UFT-F; temperature), a particle volume monitor PVM-100A (liquid water content), and a fast forward scattering spectrometer probe (FFSSP; droplet spectra). Measurements were collected on board the NCAR C-130 aircraft during research flight RF05 of DYCOMS-II field study. The EIL consists of mutual filaments of cloudy and clear air at different stages of stirring, mixing, and homogenization. Borders between these filaments are often very sharp, with the 10 cm resolution of the instruments being insufficient to characterize them properly in many cases. Certain classifications of these filaments and hypotheses about the mechanisms of their formation have been proposed. The common occurrence of filaments of sizes smaller than the resolution of instruments has been indirectly confirmed. This is in agreement with the observed cloud droplet spectra showing variations of droplet number concentration without significant change of the mean droplet diameter and spectrum width.

Entrainment into the stratocumulus-topped boundary layer (STBL) is investigated by means of large-eddy simulations. Set-up of the numerical experiment is based on the research flight RF-01 in the DYCOMS-II field campaign. We focus on the stability of the flow in the cloud-top region known as the Entrainment Interface Layer (EIL). We calculate the local gradient Richardson number, Ri, at the surface of maximum static stability and at the material top of the STBL defined by a threshold of the total water content. We found that regions in which updraughts impinge upon the inversion and diverge horizontally are characterized by small values of Ri. Resulting turbulence is responsible for entrainment and formation of the EIL. Volumes of the STBL air and the free-tropospheric air from above it, mixed in proportion resulting in negative buoyancy and typically void of cloud water, form 'cloud holes' -trenches of descending cloud-free air which surround updraught areas.The entrainment process is further analyzed using a passive scalar introduced after three hours of the simulation above the layer of maximum static stability. The mixing fraction of this scalar in the air within the cloud holes falls within the range corresponding to the buoyancy reversal. Some of the negatively buoyant mixtures sinking through the cloud holes are wrapped around the edge of cloudy regions and recirculated into the cloud, which causes a local increase of the cloud-base height. The rest of the entrained free-tropospheric air sinks slowly into the STBL and leads to its gradual dilution.

This study addresses key aspects of shallow moist convection, as simulated by a multiplume eddy-diffusivity/mass-flux (EDMF) model. Two factors suggested in the literature to be essential for the development of convective plumes are investigated: surface conditions and lateral entrainment. The model consistently decomposes the subgrid vertical mixing into convective plumes and the nonconvective environment. The modeled convection shows low sensitivity to the surface plume area. The results indicate that plume development in the subcloud layer is controlled by both surface conditions and lateral entrainment. Their impact significantly changes in the cloud layer where the surface conditions are no longer important. The development of shallow convection is dominated by the interactions between the plumes and the large-scale field and is sensitive to the representation of the variability of thermodynamic properties between the plumes. A simple two-layer model of steady-state convection is proposed to help understand the role of these processes in shaping the properties of moist convection.

A fully unified parameterization of boundary layer and moist convection (shallow and deep) is presented. The new parameterization is based on the stochastic multiplume eddy-diffusivity/mass-flux (EDMF) approach, which distinguishes between convective plumes and nonconvective mixing. The convective plumes represent both surface-forced updrafts and evaporatively driven downdrafts. The type of convection (i.e., dry, shallow, or deep) represented by the updrafts is not defined a priori, but rather depends on the near-surface updraft properties and the stochastic interactions between the plumes and the environment through lateral entrainment. Consequently, some updrafts may contribute only to the nonlocal transport within the subcloud layer, while others may condense and form shallow or even deep convection. Such a formulation is void of trigger functions and additional closures typical of modular parameterizations. The updrafts are coupled to relatively simple warm-, mixed-, and ice-phase microphysics. Each precipitating updraft forms a downdraft driven by the evaporation of detrained precipitation. The downdrafts control the development of cold pools near the surface that can invigorate convection. The new parameterization is tested in a single-column model against large-eddy simulations (LESs) for cases representing weakly precipitating marine convection and the diurnal cycle of continental deep convection. The results of these EDMF experiments compare well with the LES reference simulations. In particular, the transitions between the different dominant convection regimes are realistically simulated.

[1] Large-eddy simulations of a Lagrangian transition from a vertically well-mixed stratocumulus-topped boundary layer to a situation in which shallow cumuli penetrate an overlying layer of thin and broken stratocumulus are compared with aircraft observations collected during the Atlantic Stratocumulus Transition Experiment. Despite the complexity of the case and the long simulation period of 40 h, the six participating state-of-the-art models skillfully and consistently represent the observed gradual deepening of the boundary layer, a negative buoyancy flux at the top of the subcloud layer and the development of a double-peaked vertical velocity variance profile. The moisture flux from the subcloud to the stratocumulus cloud layer by cumulus convection exhibits a distinct diurnal cycle. During the night the moisture flux at the stratocumulus cloud base exceeds the surface evaporation flux, causing a net drying of the subcloud layer, and vice versa during daytime. The spread in the liquid water path (LWP) among the models is rather large during the first 12 h. From additional sensitivity experiments it is demonstrated that this spread is mainly attributable to differences in the parameterized precipitation rate. The LWP differences are limited through a feedback mechanism in which enhanced drizzle fluxes result in lower entrainment rates and subsequently a reduced drying at cloud top. The spread is furthermore reduced during the day as cloud layers with a greater LWP absorb more solar radiation and hence evaporate more.

Anelastic and compressible solutions are compared for two moist deep convection benchmarks, a two-dimensional thermal rising in a saturated moist-neutral deep atmosphere, and a three-dimensional supercell formation. In the anelastic model, the pressure applied in the moist thermodynamics comes from either the environmental hydrostatically balanced pressure profile in the standard anelastic model or is combined with nonhydrostatic perturbations from the elliptic pressure solver in the generalized anelastic model. The compressible model applies either an explicit acoustic-mode-resolving scheme requiring short time steps or a novel implicit scheme allowing time steps as large as those used in the anelastic model. The consistency of the unified numerical framework facilitates direct comparisons of results obtained with anelastic and compressible models. The anelastic and compressible rising thermal solutions agree not only with each other but also with the previously published compressible benchmark solution based on the comprehensive representation of moist dynamics and thermodynamics. In contrast to earlier works focusing on the formulation of moist thermodynamics, the compatibility of the initial conditions is emphasized and its impact on the benchmark solutions is documented. The anelastic and compressible supercell solutions agree well for various versions of anelastic and compressible models even for cloud updrafts reaching 15% of the speed of sound. The nonhydrostatic pressure perturbations turn out to have a negligible impact on the moist dynamics. Numerical and physical details of the simulations, such as the advection scheme, spatial and temporal resolution, or parameters of the subgrid-scale turbulence, have a more significant effect on the solutions than the particular equation system applied.

Large-eddy simulation is used to investigate the effects of cold pools driven by rain evaporation on the shallow-to-deep convection transition over land. The physically consistent methodologies are developed to obtain a time-dependent reference ensemble without cold pools and to apply interactive surface heat fluxes without modeling of surface energy and water budgets. Three different simulation ensembles are contrasted. The reference ensemble, in the spirit of one-dimensional single-column models, eliminates cold pools by horizontally homogenizing negative buoyancy production due to rain evaporation. The additional ensembles complement the reference cold-pool-free ensemble by including cold pools and by applying either interactive or prescribed surface fluxes. Contrasting these ensembles suggests possible improvements of convection parameterization in large-scale models of weather and climate. Without cold pools, the reference ensemble preserves key features of buoyancy-driven cellular convection associated with a field of convective plumes, as assumed in a typical convection parameterization. With cold pools, a significant enhancement of surface heat and moisture fluxes and about an hour delay of their daily maximum is simulated. Cold pools enhance near-surface temperature and moisture standard deviations as well as maxima of the near-surface updraft velocity. They also lead to the reduction of cloud lateral entrainment, deeper vertical development of the cloud layer, and a few-times-larger accumulated surface precipitation. Interactive surface fluxes provide a damping mechanism that noticeably suppresses all these effects. Perhaps surprisingly, cold pools do not significantly change the cloud-base convective mass flux that approximately follows the evolution of surface heat fluxes.

A pragmatic scale-adaptive turbulent kinetic energy (TKE) closure is proposed to simulate the dry convective boundary layer for a variety of horizontal grid resolutions: from 50 m, typical of large-eddy simulation models that use three-dimensional turbulence parameterizations/closures, up to 100 km, typical of climate models that use one-dimensional turbulence and convection parameterizations/closures. Since parameterizations/closures using the TKE approach have been frequently used in these two asymptotic limits, a simple method is proposed to merge them with a mixing-length-scale formulation for intermediate resolutions. This new scale-adaptive mixing length naturally increases with increasing grid length until it saturates as the grid length reaches mesoscale-model resolution. The results obtained using this new approach for dry convective boundary layers are promising. The mean vertical profiles of potential temperature and heat flux remain in good agreement for different resolutions. A continuous transition (in terms of resolution) across the gray zone is illustrated through the partitioning between the model-resolved and the subgrid-scale transports as well as by documenting the transition of the subgrid-scale TKE source/sink terms. In summary, a natural and continuous transition across resolutions (from 50 m to 100 km) is obtained, for dry convection, using exactly the same atmospheric model for all resolutions with a simple scale-adaptive mixing-length formulation.