Benchmarking Turbulence Models to Represent Cloud-Edge Mixing

This is the simulation output of the submitted manuscript "Benchmarking Turbulence Models to Represent Cloud-Edge Mixing" to the Journal of Atmospheric Sciences. 

Abstract: Considering turbulence is crucial to understand clouds. However, covering all scales involved in the turbulent mixing of clouds with their environment is computationally challenging, urging the need for simple models to represent some of the involved processes. By using full direct numerical simulations as a reference, this study compares several statistical approaches for representing small-scale turbulent mixing. All models use a comparable Lagrangian representation of cloud microphysics, and simulate the same cases of cloud edge mixing, covering different ambient humidities and turbulence intensities. It is demonstrated that all statistical models represent the evolution of thermodynamics successfully, but not all models capture the changes in cloud microphysics (cloud droplet number concentration, droplet mean radius, and spectral width). Implications of these results for using the presented models as subgrid-scale schemes are discussed.

The raw data presented here was produced by five different models and is completely available. For information on how the dataset is structured, see the readme.txt.