Focus: To advance basic knowledge of precipitating convective systems, with emphasis on up- and down-scale interactions between convection and other modes of atmospheric motion, for improving weather prediction and climate models.

MMM's study of precipitating convective systems strives to understand the physics of precipitating convection, boundary layer turbulence, surface exchange, cloud-microphysics and cloud-radiative interaction, all of which are interacting with large-scale dynamics. Quantifying precipitating convective systems and their underlying scale interactions is a multi-faceted problem which provides exciting research challenges.Better knowledge of such coupled physics will enable us to advance the representation and prediction of the atmospheric water cycle, organized convection, the atmospheric convective-radiative-dynamical equilibrium, and phenomena within the weather-climate interface.

Subsection of a comparison of normalized diurnal frequency diagrams of hourly, latitudinally averaged (30-48 N) precipitation greater than 0.1 mm/h during 3-10 July 2003 derived from (a) stage IV rainfall observations, (b) the 4-km WRF simulation that used explicit deep convection, and (c) the 22-km WRF simulation that used a cumulus parameterization. ...more...

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