Published in

Wiley, Quarterly Journal of the Royal Meteorological Society, 686(141), p. 272-284, 2014

DOI: 10.1002/qj.2356

Links

Tools

Export citation

Search in Google Scholar

Mixing length controls on high resolution simulations of convective storms

This paper is available in a repository.
This paper is available in a repository.

Full text: Download

Green circle
Preprint: archiving allowed
Orange circle
Postprint: archiving restricted
Red circle
Published version: archiving forbidden
Data provided by SHERPA/RoMEO

Abstract

We perform simulations of several convective events over the southern UK with the Met Office Unified Model (UM) at horizontal grid lengths ranging from 1.5 km to 200 m. Comparing the simulated storms on these days with the Met Office rainfall radar network allows us to apply a statistical approach to evaluate the properties and evolution of the simulated storms over a range of conditions. Here we present results comparing the storm morphology in the model and reality which show that the simulated storms become smaller as grid length decreases and that the grid length that fits the observations best changes with the size of the observed cells. We investigate the sensitivity of storm morphology in the model to the mixing length used in the subgrid turbulence scheme. As the subgrid mixing length is decreased, the number of small storms with high area-averaged rain rates increases. We show that, by changing the mixing length, we can produce a lower-resolution simulation which produces similar morphologies to a higher-resolution simulation.