A Characterization of Clouds and Precipitation Over the Southern Ocean From Synoptic to Micro Scales During the CAPRICORN Field Campaigns

Abstract

The Southern Ocean (SO) is a region of significant interest for its capacity to store excess heat and carbon. Yet large shortwave radiative biases over the SO continue to exist in both climate models and reanalysis products, which are primarily attributed to the poor representation of clouds, precipitation, aerosols, and their interactions in this region (

Characteristics and Variability of Precipitation Across Different Sectors of an Extra‐Tropical Cyclone: A Case Study Over the High‐Latitudes of the Southern Ocean

“…Montoya Duque et al. (2023), further use variables: “IRprecipitation” and “HQprecipitation” (PMW precipitation is defined as High‐Quality, HQ, precipitation, Huffman et al. (2019)) to deduce whether the rain gauge calibrated precipitation rate estimates (precipCal) use the morphing‐only or the PMW‐only information.…”

“…Montoya Duque et al. (2023), constructed the Fractional Skill Score (FSS) based on the OceanPOL (e.g., C‐band radar) against the ERA5 and GPM (IMERG) data and found that ERA5 has better FSS scores than IMERG at large spatial scales for precipitation thresholds between 0.07 and 0.6 mm hr −1 . They also noted that ERA5 commonly overestimates the frequency of precipitation and underestimates the intensity of precipitation over the SO.…”

“…While numerous precipitation products have been evaluated against surface observations from Macquarie Island (Lang et al., 2020; Tansey et al., 2022; Wang et al., 2015), this site is located at 54.5°S, amid the SO storm track rather than at high latitudes. Both satellite observations (Mace et al., 2009) and recent field observations (Montoya Duque et al., 2022; Truong et al., 2020, 2022) have identified the unique nature of the thermodynamics and cloud structure across the lower free troposphere and boundary layer at these high latitudes. Mace et al.…”

“…While numerous precipitation products have been evaluated against surface observations from Macquarie Island (Lang et al, 2020;Tansey et al, 2022;Wang et al, 2015), this site is located at 54.5°S, amid the SO storm track rather than at high latitudes. Both satellite observations (Mace et al, 2009) and recent field observations (Montoya Duque et al, 2022;Truong et al, 2020Truong et al, , 2022 have identified the unique nature of the thermodynamics and cloud structure across the lower free troposphere and boundary layer at these high latitudes. Mace et al (2009) used active remote sensing from the A-train satellites to note that this region has the highest frequency of low and mid-level clouds across the globe, even in comparison with comparable latitudes of the North Pacific and North Atlantic.…”

Characterizing Precipitation and Improving Rainfall Estimates Over the Southern Ocean Using Ship‐Borne Disdrometer and Dual‐Polarimetric C‐Band Radar

“…Precipitation estimates from reanalysis products strongly depend on model parameterizations and are at scales that do not resolve key processes and, therefore, potentially inherit the climate model biases over the region (Lang et al., 2018; Naud et al., 2014). Further, the reanalysis and satellite estimates do not agree with each other and have large observed errors (Montoya Duque et al., 2023).…”