Cloud-Top Entrainment in Stratocumulus Clouds
By Juan Pedro Mellado. 2017
177 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Cloud entrainment, the mixing between cloudy and clear air at the boundary of clouds, constitutes one paradigm for the relevance of small scales in the Earth system: By regulating cloud lifetimes, meter- and submeter-scale processes at cloud boundaries can influence planetary-scale properties. Understanding cloud entrainment is difficult given the complexity and diversity of the associated phenomena, which include turbulence entrainment within a stratified medium, convective instabilities driven by radiative and evaporative cooling, shear instabilities, and cloud microphysics. Obtaining accurate data at the required small scales is also challenging, for both simulations and measurements. During the past few decades, however, high-resolution simulations and measurements have greatly advanced our understanding of the main mechanisms controlling cloud entrainment. This article reviews some of these advances, focusing on stratocumulus clouds, and indicates remaining challenges.
Subfields: Earth-Surface Processes, Global and Planetary Change, Ocean Engineering
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/9bebb9cf59242b9f4a1a8c13156750cf2116f1dd
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In Earth-Surface Processes
In Global and Planetary Change
In Ocean Engineering
Citations in the corpus
- Large-Eddy Simulation of the Atmospheric Boundary Layer (2020, background): “Performing LES of cloud-topped boundary layers entails modelling challenges related to the representation of cloud microphysics and strong stratification (Yamaguchi and Randall 2012; Mellado 2017) that are somewhat unique.”