Analysis of Tropical Radiative Heating Profiles in the Multi- Scale Modeling Framework: A Comparison to Atmospheric Radiation Measurement Program Observations

Radiative heating associated with the distribution of water vapor and clouds in the atmosphere is an important driver of both local-scale and large-scale circulations in the tropics. One of the difficulties in producing accurate cloud and radiative heating rate profiles with a general circulation model (GCM) is the sub-grid scale nature of cloud processes and their interaction with radiation. The multi-scale modeling framework (MMF) is a new approach to climate modeling (Grabowski 2001; Khairoutdinov 2001) in which cloud processes are treated more explicitly by replacing the cloud and radiation parameterizations of a GCM with a 2D cloud system resolving model (CRM). Details of the MMF formulation are given by Khairoutdinov (2001). In this implementation of the MMF, the parent GCM is the National Center for Atmospheric Research Community Atmosphere Model (CAM), version 3 and the CRM is run with 64 columns with 4 km resolution.