Impact of resolution on large-eddy simulation of midlatitude summertime convection

Moseley, Christopher; Pscheidt, Ieda; Cioni, Guido; Heinze, Rieke

doi:https://doi.org/10.5194/acp-20-2891-2020

Articles | Volume 20, issue 5

https://doi.org/10.5194/acp-20-2891-2020

© Author(s) 2020. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

https://doi.org/10.5194/acp-20-2891-2020

© Author(s) 2020. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

Articles | Volume 20, issue 5

Research article

|

10 Mar 2020

Research article |

| 10 Mar 2020

Impact of resolution on large-eddy simulation of midlatitude summertime convection

Christopher Moseley, Ieda Pscheidt, Guido Cioni, and Rieke Heinze

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Final revised paper (published on 10 Mar 2020)
Preprint (discussion started on 20 Aug 2019)

Interactive discussion

Status: closed

AC: Author comment | RC: Referee comment | SC: Short comment | EC: Editor comment

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- Supplement

RC1: 'review cp-2019-638', Anonymous Referee #1, 20 Sep 2019
- AC1: 'Replies to the general comments of Referee #1', Christopher Moseley, 09 Oct 2019
RC2: 'review of "Impact of resolution and air temperature on Large Eddy Simulation of mid-latitude summer time convection"', Anonymous Referee #2, 27 Sep 2019
- AC2: 'Replies to the comments of Referee #2', Christopher Moseley, 09 Oct 2019

Peer-review completion

AR: Author's response | RR: Referee report | ED: Editor decision

AR by Christopher Moseley on behalf of the Authors (18 Nov 2019) Author's response Manuscript

ED: Referee Nomination & Report Request started (10 Dec 2019) by Corinna Hoose

RR by Anonymous Referee #1 (22 Dec 2019)

Suggestions for revision or reasons for rejection

I am mostly happy with the revised manuscript: the authors have addressed the points I raised in a satisfactory way. My remaining comments are mostly small and editorial.

- Please ensure colons are followed by lower case letters throughout the manuscript (maybe it is easiest to search for colon signs).
- I think it would be good to mention a further analysis of cold pools is planned, as readers may find it remarkable these are not discussed in the text.
- p1, l4: “This period was dominated by convective rainfall over large parts of the domain on most of the days.” I think this wording is a bit confusing, as convective rainfall is restricted to a small part of the total domain at any point in time.
- p1, l16: In general, some of these models may still have a parametrisation of smaller cumulus clouds, so I would say “without parametrization of deep cumulus convection”, and state at another point that no cumulus parametrisation was used in the current study.
- p2, l1: “convection-permitting”.
- p2, l3: It would be good to mention that at 625 m grid spacing, some of the larger boundary-layer eddies are likely unresolved (even if a Smagorinsky scheme is used).
- p2, l12: “Assuming a warming trend in the future, and neglecting other influences like changes in large-scale circulation and variability that are attended by climate change, the sensitivity of precipitation extremes to warmer temperatures has been heavily discussed in the recent years.” →The wording here is a bit confusing. You could start with “The sensitivity...years” and then continue with something like “Besides changes in global atmospheric temperature...”
- p2, l20: To my best knowledge, Ban et al. find a scaling that is close to CC-scaling, rather than super-CC scaling (see the abstract of their study). They argue that the super-CC scaling can result from the imposition of e.g. thresholds for wet days in the data analysis. It would be good to double-check this.
- p2, l28: “decade-long”
- p2, l28: the wording may be a bit confusing here, do you mean the simulations use 2.2km grid spacing?
- p2, l29: “have found” (plural)
- p2, l30: “However, a correct representation of the temperature scaling of heavy rainfall becomes increasingly difficult with decreasing model resolution, as Rasp et al. (2018) have shown that in principle subgrid cloud organization has to be included into stochastic cloud parametrizations.” →” However, a correct representation of the temperature scaling of heavy rainfall becomes increasingly difficult with decreasing model resolution. Rasp et al. (2018) have shown that in principle subgrid cloud organization has to be included into stochastic cloud parametrizations. ” (replace “as”, which I tend to read as “because”).
- p2, l35: “large-scale”
- p5, l8: “high resolved” → “high-resolution”?
- p8, l25: “higher resolver” → “with higher resolutions”
- p10, l21: “show” → “shows”
- p14, l19: I don’t really think there is structural convergence in the life cycle statistics shown in Fig. 5. It is hard to judge if some of the statistics have converged without an additional simulation at even higher resolution.
- p19, l10: “have a different quality” → do you mean they are more robust?
- p21, l3: “36-day”
- p21, l11: “shows”? (singular)
- p21, l21: “more deeply” → “in more detail”?
- p22, l28: “high resolved model days”: could you rephrase this (see suggestions above)?
- p22, l33: “report of” → “report”
- p23, l24: “and a grid spacing” → “with a grid spacing”

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ED: Publish subject to minor revisions (review by editor) (31 Dec 2019) by Corinna Hoose

AR by Christopher Moseley on behalf of the Authors (06 Jan 2020) Author's response Manuscript

ED: Publish as is (27 Jan 2020) by Corinna Hoose

Short summary

In this paper, we analyze a climate simulation over Germany of a continuous period in May and June 2016, with resolutions of 600 m, 300 m, and 150 m. This resolution is high enough that strong convective rain events like rain showers and thunderstorms are sufficiently resolved. Our analysis shows that the tendency of convection to organize is improved at higher resolution and that the highest-resolution simulation is closest to weather radar data.