Torrential rainfall responses to radiative and microphysical processes of ice clouds during a landfall of severe tropical storm Bilis (2006)

Abstract

Ice clouds are an important component in precipitation systems. The radiative processes of ice clouds directly impact radiation in heat budget and the microphysical processes of ice clouds directly affect latent heat and net condensation through deposition processes, which may eventually change surface rainfall. Thus, torrential rainfall responses to radiative and microphysical processes of ice clouds during a landfall of severe tropical storm Bilis (2006) are investigated with the analysis of sensitivity experiments. The two-dimensional cloud-resolving model is integrated for 3 days with imposed zonally uniform vertical velocity, zonal wind, horizontal temperature and vapor advection from NCEP/GDAS data. One sensitivity experiment excludes the radiative effects of ice clouds and the other sensitivity experiment excludes ice microphysics and associated radiative and microphysical processes. Model domain mean surface rain rate is barely changed by the exclusion of radiative effects of ice clouds due to the small decrease in net condensation associated with the small reduction in latent heat as a result of the offset between the increase in radiative cooling and the decrease in heat divergence. The exclusion of microphysical effects of ice clouds decreases the mean rain rate simply through the suppression of latent heat as a result of the removal of deposition processes. The total exclusion of ice microphysics decreases the mean rain rate mainly through the exclusion of microphysical effects of ice clouds.