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The roughness sublayer (RSL) is one compartment of the surface layer (SL) where turbulence deviates from Monin–Obukhov similarity theory. As the computing power increases, model grid sizes approach the gray zone of turbulence in the energy-containing range and the lowest model layer is located within the RSL. From this perspective, the RSL has an important implication in atmospheric modeling research. However, it has not been explicitly simulated in atmospheric mesoscale models. This study incorporates the RSL model proposed by Harman and Finnigan (2007, 2008) into the Jiménez et al. (2012) SL scheme. A high-resolution simulation performed with the Weather Research and Forecasting model (WRF) illustrates the impacts of the RSL parameterization on the wind, air temperature, and rainfall simulation in the atmospheric boundary layer. As the roughness parameters vary with the atmospheric stability and vegetative phenology in the RSL model, our RSL implementation reproduces the observed surface wind, particularly over tall canopies in the winter season by reducing the root mean square error (RMSE) from 3.1 to 1.8 m s -1. Moreover, the improvement is relevant to air temperature (from 2.74 to 2.67 K of RMSE) and precipitation (from 140 to 135 mm per month of RMSE). Our findings suggest that the RSL must be properly considered both for better weather and climate simulations and for the application of wind energy and atmospheric dispersion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Aerosol effects on clouds and precipitation account for a large portion of uncertainties in the prediction of the future course of global hydrologic circulations and climate. As a process of a better understanding of interactions between aerosol, clouds and precipitation, simulations are performed for a mixed-phase convective multiple-cloud system over the tropics. Studies on single-cloud systems have shown that aerosol-induced increases in freezing, associated increases in parcel buoyancy and thus the intensity of clouds (or updrafts) are a main mechanism which controls aerosol-cloud-precipitation interactions in convective clouds. However, in the multiple-cloud system that plays much more important roles in global hydrologic circulations and thus climate than single-cloud systems, aerosol effects on condensation play the most important role in aerosol-induced changes in the intensity of clouds and the effects on freezing play a negligible role in those changes. Aerosol-induced enhancement in evaporation intensifies gust fronts and increases the number of subsequently developing clouds, which leads to the substantial increases in condensation and associated intensity of convection. Although aerosol-induced enhancement in freezing takes part in the increases in condensation by inducing stronger convergence around cloud bottom, the increases in condensation are ~one order of magnitude larger than those in freezing. It is found that while aerosol-induced increases in freezing create intermittent extremely heavy precipitation, aerosol-induced increases in evaporation enhance light and medium precipitation in the multiple-cloud system here. This increase in light and medium precipitation makes it possible that cumulative precipitation increases with increasing aerosol concentration, although the increase is small. It is interesting that the altitude of the maximum of the time- and domain-averaged hydrometeor mass densities is quite robust to increases in aerosol concentration. This is because locations of gust fronts and homogeneous freezing do not vary significantly with changing aerosol concentration and this outweighs aerosol effects on hydrometeor size. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]