Clouds and cloud systems and their interactions with larger scales of
motion, radiation, and the Earth's surface are extremely important parts
of weather and climate systems. Their treatment in weather forecast and
climate models is a significant source of errors and uncertainty. As
computer power increases, it is beginning to be possible to explicitly
resolve cloud and precipitation processes in these models, presenting
opportunities for improving precipitation forecasts and larger-scale
phenomena such as tropical cyclones which depend critically on cloud and
precipitation physics.
This book by Professor Shouting Gao of the Institute of Atmospheric
Physics in Beijing and Xiaofan Li of NOAA's National Environmental
Satellite Data and Information Services (NESDIS) presents an update and
review of results of high-resolution, mostly two-dimensional models of
clouds and precipitation and their interactions with larger scales of
motion and the Earth's surface. It provides a thorough description of
cloud and precipitation physics, including basic governing equations and
related physics, such as phase changes of water, radiation and mixing.
Model results are compared with observations from the 1992-93 Tropical
Ocean Global Atmosphere Coupled Ocean Atmosphere Response Experiment
(TOGA COARE) experiment. The importance of the ocean to tropical
convective systems is clearly shown here in the numerical results of
simulations with their air-sea coupled modeling system. While the focus
is on tropical convection, the methodology and applicability can be
extended to cloud and precipitation processes elsewhere.
The results described in this well-written book form a solid foundation
for future high-resolution model weather forecasts and climate
simulations that resolve clouds explicitly in three dimensions--a future
that has great promise for the understanding and prediction of weather
and climate for the great benefit of society.
