13/01/2022
Webinar

EUFAR Airborne Science Webinar #2

The second EUFAR Airborne Science Webinar will be on Thursday 13 January at 1400 UTC (1500 CET). The main topic will be:

  • Airborne measurements applied to the testing and validation of high-resolution atmospheric models

The presenters will be Paul Field and Steve Abel of the Met Office.

Abstracts:

Paul Field

Aircraft provide high resolution and reliable in-situ measurements of clouds. However, due to resource (time) constraints, when sampling multiple convective clouds the role of human decisions on targeting clouds to sample can potentially lead to systematic biases. Using order statistics I will show that for gamma-distributed cloud properties a systematic bias of 1.5 could result.

Steve Abel

Research aircraft have a unique capability to provide detailed in-situ datasets of clouds and the environments in which they form. In this talk, I will provide some examples of using aircraft datasets to evaluate and develop the representation of clouds in operational weather forecast models. I will show approaches that i) use detailed flight case-studies to target model biases in specific cloud regimes, and ii) utilise observations from a large number of flights in different cloud types to improve the underlying model parameterizations of cloud microphysical processes.