Abstract
Abstract. RCEMIP, an intercomparison of multiple types of models configured in radiative–convective equilibrium (RCE), is proposed. RCE is an idealization of the climate system in which there is a balance between radiative cooling of the atmosphere and heating by convection. The scientific objectives of RCEMIP are three-fold. First, clouds and climate sensitivity will be investigated in the RCE setting. This includes determining how cloud fraction changes with warming and the role of self-aggregation of convection in climate sensitivity. Second, RCEMIP will quantify the dependence of the degree of convective aggregation and tropical circulation regimes on temperature. Finally, by providing a common baseline, RCEMIP will allow the robustness of the RCE state across the spectrum of models to be assessed, which is essential for interpreting the results found regarding clouds, climate sensitivity, and aggregation, and more generally, determining which features of tropical climate a RCE framework is useful for. A novel aspect and major advantage of RCEMIP is the accessibility of the RCE framework to a variety of models, including cloud-resolving models, general circulation models, global cloud-resolving models, single-column models, and large-eddy simulation models.
Highlights
Radiative–convective equilibrium (RCE) has long been used as an idealization of the climate system
We propose the following two sets of simulations to form the basis of RCEMIP, each to be performed at three different values of uniform, fixed SSTs: 1. RCE_small: RCE simulation on a small, square domain or single column
The RCE setup described above is to be employed across all models, but we recognize that the domain and numerical details will necessarily be different between cloud-resolving models (CRMs) and general circulation models (GCMs), which we describe below
Summary
Radiative–convective equilibrium (RCE) has long been used as an idealization of the climate system. The net feedback parameter of the RCE state may be computed, which is reminiscent of the use of single-column model simulations of RCE for the very first estimates of climate sensitivity, but RCE can be simulated in much more advanced models that allow relative humidity and clouds to vary, including models that allow for the generation of large-scale circulations by self-aggregation. In CRMs with domain geometries capable of containing multiple selfaggregated regions, there is the additional possibility of examining interactions between clouds, convection, and circulation in a framework that explicitly simulates both convection and the large-scale circulation in which it is embedded, which is a rare combination (Cronin and Wing, 2017) Across both CRMs and GCMs, RCEMIP will be able to assess how circulation strength depends on temperature. The experimental design of RCEMIP is to require a small set of experiments that are designed to maximize the utility of the RCEMIP simulations in answering the questions about clouds, climate sensitivity, and self-aggregation posed above while minimizing the effort required by the modeling groups
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