Wellmann, C, Barrett, AI, Johnson, JS et al. (4 more authors) (2020) Comparing the impact of environmental conditions and microphysics on the forecast uncertainty of deep convective clouds and hail. Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics, 20 (4). pp. 2201-2219. ISSN 1680-7316
Abstract
Severe hailstorms have the potential to damage buildings and crops. However, important processes for the prediction of hailstorms are insufficiently represented in operational weather forecast models. Therefore, our goal is to identify model input parameters describing environmental conditions and cloud microphysics, such as the vertical wind shear and strength of ice multiplication, which lead to large uncertainties in the prediction of deep convective clouds and precipitation. We conduct a comprehensive sensitivity analysis simulating deep convective clouds in an idealized setup of a cloud-resolving model. We use statistical emulation and variance-based sensitivity analysis to enable a Monte Carlo sampling of the model outputs across the multi-dimensional parameter space. The results show that the model dynamical and microphysical properties are sensitive to both the environmental and microphysical uncertainties in the model. The microphysical parameters lead to larger uncertainties in the output of integrated hydrometeor mass contents and precipitation variables. In particular, the uncertainty in the fall velocities of graupel and hail account for more than 65 % of the variance of all considered precipitation variables and for 30 %–90 % of the variance of the integrated hydrometeor mass contents. In contrast, variations in the environmental parameters – the range of which is limited to represent model uncertainty – mainly affect the vertical profiles of the diabatic heating rates.
Metadata
Item Type: | Article |
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Authors/Creators: |
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Copyright, Publisher and Additional Information: | © Author(s) 2020. This work is distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) |
Dates: |
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Institution: | The University of Leeds |
Academic Units: | The University of Leeds > Faculty of Environment (Leeds) > School of Earth and Environment (Leeds) > Inst for Climate & Atmos Science (ICAS) (Leeds) |
Funding Information: | Funder Grant number NERC (Natural Environment Research Council) NE/I020059/1 |
Depositing User: | Symplectic Publications |
Date Deposited: | 03 Jun 2020 13:37 |
Last Modified: | 03 Jun 2020 19:35 |
Status: | Published |
Publisher: | European Geosciences Union |
Identification Number: | 10.5194/acp-20-2201-2020 |
Open Archives Initiative ID (OAI ID): | oai:eprints.whiterose.ac.uk:161457 |