A treatment for the stratocumulus-to-cumulus transition in GCMs

Numerical models of climate have great difficulties with the simulation of marine low clouds in the subtropical Pacific and Atlantic Oceans. It has been especially difficult to reproduce the observed geographical distributions of the different cloud regimes in those regions. The present study discusses mechanisms proposed in previous works for changing one regime into another. One criterion is based on the theory of stratocumulus destruction through cloud top entrainment instability due to buoyancy reversal—situations in which the mixture of two air parcels becomes denser than either of the original parcels due to evaporation of cloud water. Another criterion is based on the existence of decoupling in the boundary layer. When decoupled, the stratocumulus regime changes to another in which these clouds can still exist together with cumulus. In a LES study, the authors have suggested that a combination of those two criteria can be used to diagnose whether, at a location, the cloud regime corresponds to a well-mixed stratocumulus regime, a shallow cumulus regime, or to a transitional regime where the boundary layer is decoupled. The concept is tested in the framework of an atmospheric general circulation model (GCM). It is found that several outstanding features of disagreement between simulation and observation can be interpreted as misrepresentations of the cloud regimes by the GCM. A novel criterion for switching among regimes is proposed to alleviate the effects of these misrepresentations.