Subtropical Marine Low Clouds and Surface Wind Distributions (e-book) (used book) | bookbook.eu

Description

This book is designed to represent subtropical marine stratus and stratocumulus (MSC) and surface winds in a simple but physical consistent way, which has applications in climate modeling and offshore wind energy development. A simple low cloud cover scheme is developed in Chapter 2, in which the variation of MSC is formulated by connecting low cloud amount with lower tropospheric stability (LTS), large-scale subsidence, and dynamical transport of available dry inhibition energy below trade wind inversion. The new scheme produces realistic seasonal and inter-annual variations of MSC amounts and systematically reduces the NCAR CAM3.1 model biases as shown in Chapter 3. The lower troposphere available thermal inhibition energy is also shown in Chapter 4 to be a skillful predictor in diagnosing MSC in monthly and seasonal time-scales. The influence of MSC, ocean SST, and large-scale divergence on surface wind probability distribution are addressed in Chapter 5 using satellite observations and a simple stochastic model, which can successfully reproduce the observed mean, the standard deviation, and skewness of surface wind speeds in the southeast Pacific.