Dreary state of precipitation in global models
Colorado State University · European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts · +5 more institutions
Abstract
New, definitive measures of precipitation frequency provided by CloudSat are used to assess the realism of global model precipitation. The character of liquid precipitation (defined as a combination of accumulation, frequency, and intensity) over the global oceans is significantly different from the character of liquid precipitation produced by global weather and climate models. Five different models are used in this comparison representing state‐of‐the‐art weather prediction models, state‐of‐the‐art climate models, and the emerging high‐resolution global cloud “resolving” models. The differences between observed and modeled precipitation are larger than can be explained by observational retrieval errors or by…
Citation impact
- FWCI
- 25.01
- Percentile
- 100%
- References
- 42
Authors
9- GLGraeme L. StephensCorresponding
Colorado State University
- TLTristan L’Ecuyer
Colorado State University
- RFRichard Forbes
European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts
- AGAndrew Gettelmen
NSF National Center for Atmospheric Research
- JGJean‐Christophe Golaz
NOAA Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory, Princeton University
Topics & keywords
- Precipitation
- Climatology
- Environmental science
- Climate model
- Meteorology
- General Circulation Model
- Depiction
- Climate change