Tropical Cirrus Are Highly Sensitive to Ice Microphysics Within a Nudged Global Storm-Resolving Model

Abstract

Cirrus dominate the longwave radiative budget of the tropics. For the first time, the variability in cirrus properties and longwave cloud radiative effects (CREs) that arises from using different microphysical schemes within nudged global storm-resolving simulations from a single model, is quantified. Nudging allows us to compute radiative biases precisely using coincident satellite measurements and to fix the large-scale dynamics across our set of simulations to isolate the influence of microphysics. We run 5-day simulations with four commonly-used microphysics schemes of varying complexity (SAM1MOM, Thompson, M2005 and P3) and find that the tropical average longwave CRE varies over 20 W m−2 between schemes. P3 best reproduces observed longwave CRE. M2005 and P3 simulate cirrus with realistic frozen water path but unrealistically high ice crystal number concentrations which commonly hit limiters and lack the variability and dependence on frozen water content seen in aircraft observations. Thompson and SAM1MOM have too little cirrus.