ACINN Graduate Seminar - SS 2025
2025-06-25 at 12:30 (on-line and on-site)
Radiation and links to turbulence and convection in complex terrain
Sophia Schäfer
Centre National de Recherches Météorologiques (Météo-France, CNRS), Toulouse, France
Radiation in the Earth system drives dynamical and physical processes on all scales, from cloud particle growth to surface heating, local circulations, weather and climate. Capturing the interactions of 3D clouds and orography with radiation is particularly challenging, since clouds and mountains vary strongly on small spatial scales and are strongly three-dimensional, while radiation schemes in weather and climate models have to simplify by disregarding 3D effects in favour of 1D calculations. Uncertainties in the radiation scheme and its inputs can affect energy balance, cloud development and dynamics and lead to uncertainties in weather and climate predictions, therefore ongoing work on improving radiation modelling is needed, especially at high resolution.
The radiation scheme ecRad (Hogan & Bozzo 2018) is used in the operational numerical weather prediction models AROME and ARPEGE and the high-resolution research model Meso-NH at Météo-France (as well as in the IFS and ICON models). Several options are available for the radiation solver, and cloud parametrisationm including approximations of 3D effects, allowing us to test several methods of modelling 3D clouds and mountains for radiation and the impact on turbulence and convection and compare to observations and very high resolution Monte Carlo models. We are planning to adress this in a planned joint French-Austrian research project.
Within the TEAMx summer EOP, we have set up 2D arrays of radiation measurements at Kolsass and Nafingalm to directly measure the spatial distribution of radiation fluxes and effects of 3D clouds and mountains. These will be used to evaluate and improve the operational model forecasts as well as the 500 m AROME simulations conducted within TEAMx and Meso-NH simulations at LES resolutions.
Reference:
Hogan, R. J., & Bozzo, A. (2018), A flexible and efficient radiation scheme for the ECMWF model. Journal of Advances in Modeling Earth Systems, 10, 1990-2008. https://doi.org/10.1029/2018MS001364
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