Statistics of the Subgrid Cloud of an Idealized Tropical Cyclone at Convection‐Permitting Resolution

Abstract

The clouds in a tropical cyclone (TC) exhibit a large variety of processes and forms due to the underlying vortex dynamics. For physically realistic numerical simulations of TCs, the cloud processes must be adequately resolved or parameterized. Current operational numerical weather prediction (NWP) models for TC simulation and forecasting have a horizontal grid size on the order of 1 km, which is convection-permitting but not sufficient to resolve individual convective cells fully (e.g., Bryan et al., 2003;Moeng et al., 2010). Including subgrid parameterization of convection in the physics configuration is a practical means to account for the effect of unresolved convection on the resolved TC dynamics.For practical uses in NWP models, scale-adaptive algorithms of convective mass flux have been introduced into traditional quasi-equilibrium convection parameterization schemes that can be used at convection-permitting resolutions (