Meeting Minutes 2024: Atmosphere Working Group (Archived)

Atmosphere WG Meeting 23/10/24 minutes

15 participants

Luke Harrison - Update from ACCESS APS2-APS3 changes and impacts on cloud clover over the Great Barrier Reef.

  • Working on Marine Cloud Brightening (MCB)
  • Using aerosols to increase albedo of low marine clouds
  • Using CSIRO eReefs currently forced with BARRA-R1. Before that tthey were using ACCESS-R.
  • Large difference in Oktas over summer periods (Dec-May) from 2015-16 b/w BARRA R1, R2 and ACCESS-R.
  • Compared against Himawari-8 cloud products.
  • Even though the Himawari cloud is probably biased high (because it can’t detect low clouds under high ones), results suggest the models continue to underpredict amounts of low cloud.
  • Q : from Charmaine. Cloud cover doesn’t necessarily take into account optical properties (e.g. surface radiation, optical depth)
  • Q : From Yi. Dan Harrison has a report where we compared cloud cover statistics against different satellite cloud products. Products with active sensors are probably a better source of ground truth.
  • Q : From Paul. Celiometer data at coastal airports another source of ground truth?

Charmaine Franklin - R&D workshop summary

  • First joint workshop with the UM Momentum partnership.
  • UKMO has had operational convective-scale modelling (UKV) since 2010. BoM since 2017 (ACCESS-C2).
  • Collaboration to build a km-scale science configuration that works at mid-latitude and tropics (RAL3)
  • 265 registrations with strong international presence and Australian academic community.
  • A lot of talks on the NextGen model (Lfric) as UM development has now ceased.
  • RAL3.3 has been approved and regional suites (nesting, ensemble nesting and coupled) are being updated to UM13.5. Will be available on NCI soon!
  • RAL3.0 can miss heavy rainfall due to implementation with new cloud microphysics suite CASIM
  • Convective Scale Evaluation Toolkit (CSET) tutorial was very popular
  • LFric training was held next week, both global and regional. Visualisation is different as the grid is no longer a regular lat/lon
  • Good interaction b/w researchers and forecasters
  • Workshop website contains all the presentations and slides

Zhangcheng Pei - UTAS. Antarctic Cloud simulation

  • Running UM v13.0 in RAL3.1 (CASIM + Bimodal) at 1.5 km at 10 minute resolution, embedded in ERA5 centred at Davis station on Antarctic coast.
  • Case studies on significant snowfall.
  • Experiments with aerosol climatologies, changing Cloud Drop Number, improved orography and V21 INP parameterization.
  • Aerosol climatology underestimates aerosol concentrations.
  • V21 INP enhances liquid water and improves downwelling long-wave radiation, at the cost of overly diminishing short-wave radiation.
  • Uses EMC squared simulator to allow model/obs comparison which may be of greater interest. This is now integrated into a suite to allow pseduo lidar/radar products (in this case)
  • Q : Yi, what kind of temperature ranges are we looking at?

Clare Richards - ACCESS NRI updates on records and datasets

  • Frameworks for reference datasets and requests.
  • Hoping to speed up approval processes.
  • For Atmosphere WG requests, publication of AUS2200 datasets has been approved, currently in-progress (catalogue IDS and DOI etc). Should be ready in a few weeks
  • Three datasets for next release are:
    • OSTIA SSTs,
    • SST/SIC Ancillary files
    • UM nudging based on ERA5 at N96

Heidi - ACCESS NRI quick updated on resource availability.

Next date?

  • Pencilled in for Thu 28th?
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