Abstract
The effects of radiation heating and cooling on cumulus cloud development have been the focus of considerable attention for many years. However, it is still not clear how radiation impacts cloud droplet growth. Since cloud inhomogeneity has a great influence on radiation transmission, we coupled the 3D atmospheric radiative transfer model using the spherical harmonic discrete ordinate method with WRF-LES, which can improve the simulation accuracy of the inhomogeneous effect of clouds on radiation compared with that of the 1D radiation method. The shortwave and longwave radiation fluxes for upward and downward directions were simulated with different solar zenith angles. The comparison of 1D and 3D radiative solvers for deep convective cloud cases shows that the 3D radiative solver provides an accurate structure of solar and thermal radiation characteristics and the spatial distribution field. The solar radiation heating is likely to increase perpendicular to the solar incidence direction. For longwave radiation, the cooling effect on the cloud top and the heating effect on the cloud base are both more intense in the 3D radiation model. This study focuses on 3D cloud-radiative interactions in an inhomogeneous cloud field in a large eddy simulation, and the results suggest that compared with the widely used 1D radiative solver in WRF, the 3D radiation model can provide a precise description of the radiation field in an inhomogeneous atmosphere.
Highlights
Radiation and cloud interactions have been widely recognized as one of the key factors influencing the microphysical processes in atmospheric science [1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12,13]
The atmospheric radiation changes the evolution of cloud droplets during evaporation, condensation, and freezing [3,10,16,22,23,24,25,26]
To better evaluate the difference between the solar zenith angle and the radiation transmission process, the solar zenith angle was set as zero, and the real zenith angle was obtained from 12:00 UTC to 12:30 UTC. The former describes in detail the scattering process of solar radiation under ideal conditions
Summary
Radiation and cloud interactions have been widely recognized as one of the key factors influencing the microphysical processes in atmospheric science [1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12,13]. The interactions between radiation and clouds are realized through microphysical and dynamical processes [3,5,6,10,12,16,21,22]. The atmospheric radiation changes the evolution of cloud droplets during evaporation, condensation, and freezing [3,10,16,22,23,24,25,26]. The solar and thermal radiant energy converge and diverge in the atmosphere, forming a nonadiabatic heating or cooling source, resulting in horizontal and vertical stratification instability in the atmosphere [16,30,31]
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