High Resolution Measurements and Modeling in the Arctic

• Main Authors: Roesler, Erika Louise, Hillman, Ben, Dexheimer, Dari, Dennis, Lauren, McChesney, Matthew, Hardesty, Jasper, Namachivayam, Siddharth, Jain, Akshay
• Language: unknown
• Published: 2019
• Subjects: 58 GEOSCIENCES; 54 ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES; Arctic
• Online Access: http://www.osti.gov/servlets/purl/1483466; https://www.osti.gov/biblio/1483466; https://doi.org/10.2172/1483466

This report details the activity of the project, "High Resolution Modeling and Measurements in the Arctic" spanning Fiscal Years 2016 - 2018 supported by the Sandia National Laboratories Laboratory Directed Research and Development (LDRD) program. The project's primary goal was to test the hypothesis that global climate model bias of low boundary layer clouds lacking liquid water in the Arctic could be improved by increasing horizontal resolution in the model. As model resolution is constrained by computational resources, four different model types were explored and compared to test the project's primary theory. Given the Arctic is a data-sparse region lacking robust data sets of liquid water in clouds, this project also obtained in situ measurements of low clouds with sensors on a tethered balloon system to constrain and compare with the models. Although other model biases remained, the liquid water path generally increased with resolution, supporting the original hypothesis.