The impact of aerosols and model grid spacing on a supercell storm from Swabian MOSES 2021

Abstract

The supercell storm that occurred in southwestern Germany on June 23, 2021, had an exceptionally long lifetime of 7.5 hr, travelled a distance of nearly 190 km, and produced large amounts of hail. During that summer, the Swabian MOSES field campaign was held in that area, and several hydro‐meteorological measurements are available, as the storm passed directly over the main observation site. We present hindcasts of this event with the Icosahedral Non‐hydrostatic model using two horizontal grid spacings (i.e., 2 km, 1 km) with a single‐moment and an advanced double‐moment microphysics scheme. Numerical results show that all 2 km model realizations do not simulate convective precipitation at the correct location and time. For the 1 km grid spacing, changes in aerosol concentration resulted in large changes in convective precipitation. Only the 1 km run assuming a low cloud condensation nuclei (CCNs) concentration is able to realistically capture the storm, whereas no supercell is simulated in the more polluted scenarios. Observed aerosol particle concentrations indicate that CCNs values were the lowest of the month, which suggests that the low aerosol concentration is a reasonable assumption. The thermodynamic structure of the pre‐convective environment, as well as other observations, showed the best agreement to this model run as well, indicating that the good representation of the supercell was obtained for the right reason. The automatic tracking of individual clouds revealed that more convective cells with longer lifetimes are simulated at finer resolution. We also find a negative aerosol–precipitation effect that is not only due to a reduced collision–coalescence process, but also to weaker cold‐rain processes. These findings demonstrate the benefits of using an aerosol‐aware double‐moment microphysics scheme for convective‐scale predictability and that the use of different CCNs concentrations can determine whether a supercell is successfully simulated or not.