Impacts of stochastic coalescence variability on warm rain initiation using Lagrangian microphysics in box and large-eddy simulations

Abstract

Abstract Various coalescence methods for Lagrangian microphysics schemes are tested in box and large-eddy simulation (LES) models, including the stochastic all-or-nothing super-droplet method (SDM) and a version of SDM (dSDM) that applies a fractional approach similar to the average impact method. In LES, variabilities driven by microphysics and by flow realizations are separated using the “piggybacking” technique. Rain initiation averaged over many realizations of the box model is delayed and rain variability increases as the number of super-drops per collision volume (NSD) is decreased using SDM. In contrast, rain initiation time using SDM in LES is insensitive to NSD for 32 ≤ NSD ≤ 512. This is explained through the interaction between LES grid boxes, each acting as a separate collision volume. Variability across the ensemble of LES collision volumes using SDM results in rain quickly initiating in some of the LES grid cells at low NSD and leading to a similar overall timing of rain initiation from the cloud compared to simulations with high NSD. There is a ∼20% decrease in the total rain mass and mean rain flux as NSD is increased from 32 to 256, with little additional change as NSD is increased from 256 to 512. The fractional coalescence approach in dSDM leads to reduced microphysical variability and a 15-18 min delay in rain initiation compared to SDM. An additional LES ensemble with microphysical variability feeding back to the dynamics shows that flow variability dominates the impact of microphysical variability on rain properties. Thus, flow variability must be constrained to isolate impacts of microphysical variability.