Processes important for forecasting of clouds over snow

• Main Author: Hagman, Martin
• Format: Master Thesis
• Language: English
• Published: Stockholms universitet, Meteorologiska institutionen (MISU) 2020
• Subjects: Boundary-layer meteorology; WRF; Initialization; Stratocumulus clouds; Parameterization; Stable boundary layer; Single Column Model; Meteorology and Atmospheric Sciences; Meteorologi och atmosfärforskning; Sodankylä; Northern Finland
• Online Access: http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:su:diva-179982

The Swedish Armed Forces setup of the Weather Research and Forecasting Model (WRF) has problems to forecast low clouds in stably stratified conditions when the ground is covered by snow. The aim of this thesis is to understand what causes this deficit. Simulations during January and February 2018 are here compared with observations from Sodankylä in northern Finland. It is revealed that neither type of planetary boundary layer parameterization chosen nor vertical or horizontal interpolation are responsible for the deficiency. Instead, our experiments show that, to first order, poor initialization of Stratocumulus (Sc) clouds from the host model, Atmospheric Model High Resolution (HRES), of the Integrated Forecast System (IFS) is the missing link. In situations when Sc clouds are missing in the IFS analysis, although they exist in reality, we use information from vertical soundings from Sodankylä. In the initialization process we used the fact that liquid potential temperature is constant in a well-mixed cloud. Initializing cloud water and cloud ice from IFS HRES and from soundings with different methods improves the model performance and the formation of very low artificial clouds at the first model level is prohibited.