Earth-system-model evaluation of cloud and precipitation occurrence for supercooled and warm clouds over the Southern Ocean's Macquarie Island

Stanford, McKenna W.; Fridlind, Ann M.; Silber, Israel; Ackerman, Andrew S.; Cesana, Greg; Mülmenstädt, Johannes; Protat, Alain; Alexander, Simon; McDonald, Adrian

doi:https://doi.org/10.5194/acp-23-9037-2023

Articles | Volume 23, issue 16

https://doi.org/10.5194/acp-23-9037-2023

© Author(s) 2023. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

https://doi.org/10.5194/acp-23-9037-2023

© Author(s) 2023. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

Articles | Volume 23, issue 16

Research article

|

17 Aug 2023

Research article |

| 17 Aug 2023

Earth-system-model evaluation of cloud and precipitation occurrence for supercooled and warm clouds over the Southern Ocean's Macquarie Island

McKenna W. Stanford, Ann M. Fridlind, Israel Silber, Andrew S. Ackerman, Greg Cesana, Johannes Mülmenstädt, Alain Protat, Simon Alexander, and Adrian McDonald

Data sets

Ceilometer (CEIL) V. Morris, D. Zhang, and B. Ermold https://doi.org/10.5439/1181954

Surface Meteorological Instrumentation (ABMMET) J. Howie and A. Protat https://doi.org/10.5439/1597382

STA Cloud Radar data from Macquarie Island, 2016-2017 S. Alexander https://doi.org/10.26179/5d91836ca8fc3

University of Canterbury's Vaisala CL51 Ceilometer at Macquarie Island 2016-2018 S. Alexander and A. McDonald https://doi.org/10.26179/5d91835e2ccc3

Antarctic Climate Data Collected by Australian Agencies I. Barnes-Keoghan https://data.aad.gov.au/metadata/records/Antarctic_Meteorology

Minnis Cloud Products Using Visst Algorithm (VISSTPXHI8MINNIS) ARM User Facility https://adc.arm.gov/discovery/#/results/site_code::mcq

Model code and software

Silber_et_al_EMC2_gmd-2021-194_code_and_data I. Silber, R. C. Jackson, A. M. Fridlind, A. S. Ackerman, S. Collis, J. Verlinde, and J. Ding https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.5115252

Stanford_et_al_ACP_MICRE_2023-170_code M. W. Stanford https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.8231170

Short summary

Clouds play an important role in the Earth’s climate system as they modulate the amount of radiation that either reaches the surface or is reflected back to space. This study demonstrates an approach to robustly evaluate surface-based observations against a large-scale model. We find that the large-scale model precipitates too infrequently relative to observations, contrary to literature documentation suggesting otherwise based on satellite measurements.