Parallelized LES model (PALM) outputs of shallow convection with different radiative transfer and land surface coupling configuration

This dataset contains large-eddy simulation (LES) outputs from the parallelized LES model (PALM, version 6.0), configured to simulate shallow convective clouds observed at the Atmospheric Radiation Measurement (ARM) Southern Great Plains (SGP) central facility on 21 June 1997. During this well-documented case, shallow cumuli developed over a relatively dry land surface. The model is set up with a horizontal domain of 128 × 128 grid points at 100 m spacing and extends vertically from the surface to 4000 m with a uniform resolution of 40 m. Large-scale forcing is derived using a variational analysis method constrained by observational data from the SGP site (Zhang & Lin, 1997). Three numerical experiments are included: 3D LSM (filename suffix: 3_10_rad_off): Simulation with TenStream 3D radiative transfer and interactive land surface coupling; 1D LSM (filename suffix: 2str_rad_off): Simulation with conventional two-stream radiative transfer and interactive land surface coupling; No LSM (filename suffix: noslm): Simulation without land surface coupling, where surface heat fluxes are prescribed from the 1D-LSM simulation. This configuration effectively imposes horizontally homogeneous surface fluxes. To isolate the effects of cloud-shadow-induced surface heterogeneity, radiative heating is not interactively fed back to the flow solver in the two radiation-enabled experiments (3D LSM and 1D LSM). Other 3D radiative processes—such as side illumination and side escape—are expected to have only minor influences on cloud evolution in this configuration and are therefore excluded here. A motionless background state is adopted to amplify the impact of 3D radiation on cloud development. Each simulation was integrated for 14 hours, with full 3D model output saved at 1-minute intervals. Here provide time series of: Area-mean vertical profiles (time*z; filename prefix: DATA_1D_PR) Horizontal distribution of surface or total-column fields (time*y*x; filename prefix: DATA_2D_XY) Three-dimensional fields (time*z*y*x; filename prefix: DATA_3D) The dataset is intended for studying the interactions among shallow convection, 3D radiative transfer, and land–atmosphere coupling, and for evaluating the representation of these processes in weather and climate models.