The LASSO-CACTI Library of Deep Convection Simulations for Córdoba, Argentina: Overview of Mesoscale and Large-Eddy Simulations

Abstract

The U.S. Department of Energy Atmospheric Radiation Measurement (ARM) User Facility recently released ensembles of high-resolution atmospheric simulations of deep convection to complement ARM's measurements. These simulations are from the Large-Eddy Simulation (LES) ARM Symbiotic Simulation and Observation (LASSO) activity and are for 20 case dates during ARM's Cloud, Aerosol, and Complex Terrain Interactions (CACTI) field campaign that took place in 2018–2019, which is concurrent with the National Science Foundation's Remote Sensing of Electrification, Lightning, and Mesoscale/Microscale Processes with Adaptive Ground Observations (RELAMPAGO) campaign. This LASSO-CACTI scenario focuses on orographically forced deep convection and provides simulations on four model domains with grid spacings of 7.5 km down to 100 m. Each case date nominally has 33 ensemble members at the 2.5 km grid spacing, based on varying the boundary conditions to the outermost model domain. This provides researchers with a measure of the sensitivity of the simulated convection to the background environment. A subset of nine case dates extends these simulations down to 100 m grid spacing to provide researchers with detailed cloud simulations at LES scale. Some case dates include additional ensemble members with varied physics parameterizations. The greater than 2 petabyte library of simulations is freely available for researchers to download for their work, as well as to access via ARM's high-performance computing cluster. This paper describes the library, provides high-level comparisons of the simulations to help users understand what is available, and gives an overview of the skill scores used to identify simulation behaviors within the ensembles.