Expanding the Computational Frontier of Multi-Scale Atmospheric Simulation to Advance Understanding of Low Cloud / Climate Feedbacks

The objective of this research is to better understand global low-cloud feedbacks and aerosol indirect effects by using innovative methods in global climate simulation to explicitly resolve the small (250-m) scale turbulent eddies that form boundary-layer clouds.This has been a decades-long parameterization challenge for global climate models, leading to a large spread of simulated low cloud feedbacks and climate sensitivity that are a primary source of uncertainty in climate projections for the 21stcentury.  Even the most advanced global cloud resolving models do not exceed 1-10 km horizontal grid resolution. This does not resolve boundary layer eddies, so their key physics must still be approximated, producing comparable modeling uncertainties to conventional global climate models.