Use of aircraft and remote sensing observations, and global-storm resolving models, to investigate mixed-phase and cold cloud processes

• Main Author: Atlas, Rachel Lydia
• Other Authors: Bretherton, Christopher
• Format: Thesis
• Language: English
• Published: 2022
• Subjects: Atmospheric sciences; Southern Ocean
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/1773/49257

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Washington, 2022 Recent advances in computing power have made it possible to run global atmospheric models with comprehensive physics with finer grid spacing than ever before. These models, called global storm-resolving models (GSRMs), explicitly simulate a wide range of dynamics from the mesoscale up to the planetary scale, making it possible to trace the impact of certain cloud-scale processes on the radiative budget of the Earth. GSRMs are particularly valuable when used in conjunction with observational datasets. Observations are critical for evaluating the representation of clouds in GSRMs, and GSRMs are useful for building a process-level understanding of the origin of observed cloud features. This work leverages data from 9 aircraft campaigns and 4 remote sensing datasets, and model output from 9 GSRM simulations, to explore three different topics in cloud physics: secondary ice production in Southern Ocean clouds, the sensitivity of tropical anvils to model microphysics, and the impact of small-scale motions on thin cirrus clouds in the tropical tropopause layer.