Abstract
Abstract. Horizontal and vertical variability of water vapor is omnipresent in the tropics, but its interaction with cloudiness poses challenges for weather and climate models. In this study we compare airborne lidar measurements from a summer and a winter field campaign in the tropical Atlantic with high-resolution simulations to analyze the water vapor distributions in the trade wind regime, its covariation with cloudiness, and their representation in simulations. Across model grid spacing from 300 m to 2.5 km, the simulations show good skill in reproducing the water vapor distribution in the trades as measured by the lidar. An exception to this is a pronounced moist model bias at the top of the shallow cumulus layer in the dry winter season which is accompanied by a humidity gradient that is too weak at the inversion near the cloud top. The model's underestimation of water vapor variability in the cloud and subcloud layer occurs in both seasons but is less pronounced than the moist model bias at the inversion. Despite the model's insensitivity to resolution from hecto- to kilometer scale for the distribution of water vapor, cloud fraction decreases strongly with increasing model resolution and is not converged at hectometer grid spacing. The observed cloud deepening with increasing water vapor path is captured well across model resolution, but the concurrent transition from cloud-free to low cloud fraction is better represented at hectometer resolution. In particular, in the wet summer season the simulations with kilometer-scale resolution overestimate the observed cloud fraction near the inversion but lack condensate near the observed cloud base. This illustrates how a model's ability to properly capture the water vapor distribution does not necessarily translate into an adequate representation of shallow cumulus clouds that live at the tail of the water vapor distribution.
Highlights
Moisture fields, unlike temperature fields, are not smooth, but they vary on the regional scale in particular in the lower troposphere, where water vapor values can be large
While the winter situations are characterized by similar and undisturbed trade wind conditions, the summer flights encountered a significant layer of Saharan dust on 12 and 19 August, the flight on 22 August was close to the intertropical convergence zone (ITCZ), and the flight on 24 August was close to the tropical storm Garcon (Gutleben et al, 2019)
We use HAMP to span the moisture space; to quantify what WALES misses, in particular in the wet regions; and to construct a “stretched moisture space” that enables a fair comparison between WALES and ICON
Summary
Unlike temperature fields, are not smooth, but they vary on the regional scale in particular in the lower troposphere, where water vapor values can be large. We use airborne lidar measurements from two field campaigns in the northern tropical Atlantic to analyze the vertical structure and the spatial variability of water vapor and clouds and their representation in simulations with resolution from hecto- to kilometer scale. Simulations with hectometer grid spacing still do not have a grid spacing fine enough to represent details of shallow convection, even kilometer-scale simulations are found to reproduce many features, such as the daily cycle in cloud amount and precipitation, better than climate models with convective parameterization (Stevens et al, 2020; Vial et al, 2019) It is an open question whether hectometer- and kilometer-scale simulations with realistic and varying largescale states are able to represent water vapor variability and its covariation with clouds in the trades and whether this ability depends on resolution.
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