Case: 25 January 2018

Summary

Open cellular cumulus that transitioned to a drizzling stratocumulus deck for an extended period

Description

This was a multi-day event that began on January 25th with open cells that transitioned to a closed stratocumulus deck as the event progressed. This event was collected during the ACE-ENA campaign and included a G-1 aircraft mission. The boundary layer winds associated with the event were from the northeast. The widespread cloud deck sampled during the second-half of this event features drizzle; ARM profiling observations also indicated signatures of precipitation that reached the surface at various times. There were upper level clouds observed over the northern part of the LASSO modeling domain owing to a stalled anticyclone near the Azores. Inversion height at approximately 1.6 km AGL.

Available assets

Standard ARM profiling assets, SEVIRI. ACE-ENA campaign day, which includes 4 radiosonde launches, SACR, XSAPR, RLPROF-FEX, ARM AAF Gulfstream-1 (G-1)

Critical period: 11:00-onwards

The early open-cell cloud characteristics have transitioned to closed-cell behaviors

Figure 12 True color afternoon MODIS AQUA image with overlaid LES domains. The image domain corresponds to the size of the model forcing domain.