High-resolution simulations of clouds and precipitation over Germany

High-resolution simulations of clouds and precipitation over Germany

Isosurface of rain water (grey), cloud water (lightblue) and cloud ice (blue) in kg/kg on 28 May 2013 at 1530 UTC over North-Eastern Germany as simulated with the COSMO-model

Contact: Dr. Christian Barthlott

To improve our understanding of cloud and precipitation processes and their implication for climate prediction, the research initiative High Definition Clouds and Precipitation (HD(CP)2 ) has been started. Besides the development of a new model system capable of very high-resolution simulations over domains of 1000 km, a fundamental part of the project was a large measurement campaign near Jülich in western Germany which was conducted in spring 2013. These measurements enable a critical model evaluation at the scale of the model simulations and provide information on sub grid variability and microphysical properties that are subject to parameterizations. In our work, we conduct numerical simulations at different horizontal grid spacings of 2.8 km, 1 km, 500 m, and 250 m with the aim to determine the spatial and temporal variability of cloud-related parameters and how the variability changes with model grid spacing.