Abstract
How high convective clouds can go is of great importance to climate. Cloud ice and liquid water that detrain nearthe top of convective cores are important for the formation of anvil clouds and thus impact cloud radiative forcing and theEarth’s radiation budget. This study uses CloudSat observations to evaluate convective cloud top heights in the NationalCenter for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) Community Atmosphere Model (CAM5). Results show that convective cloud topheights in the tropics are much lower than observed by CloudSat, by more than 2 km on average. Temperature and moistureanomalies from climatological means are composited for convective clouds of different heights for both observations andmodel simulation. It is found that convective environment is warmer and moister, and the anomalies are larger for clouds ofhigher tops. For a given convective cloud top height, the corresponding atmosphere in CAM5 is more convectively unstablethan what the CloudSat observations indicate, suggesting that there is too much entrainment into convective clouds in themodel.
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