Phys.org April 26, 2022
Modeling anomalies referred to as grey zone, arise when the model resolution approximates the length scale of turbulence features while modeling the atmosphere. An international team of researchers (USA – Notre Dame, Saudi Arabia) leveraged a new set of one-way nested, full-physics multiscale numerical experiments to quantify the magnitude of the errors introduced at gray zone resolutions in a real-case application. The new set of experiments conducted in Saudi Arabia spanned a wide range of scales and strategies to suppress resolved convection at gray zone resolutions. Detailed analyses of their experiments showed that (i) grid-dependent convective structures entail minor impacts on the first order characteristics of the fully developed boundary layer due to some degree of implicit scale-awareness of 1D parameterizations and (ii) 3D closures and scale-aware schemes outperform traditional 1D schemes especially in the surface layer. According to the researchers their work provides a benchmark of real simulations that can be extended to assess how new turbulence closures perform at gray zone resolutions…read more. TECHNICAL ARTICLEÂ