Marat Khairoutdinov

I use a cloud-resolving model (CRM) named System for Atmospheric Modeling, or SAM, which I developed to study many interesting convection problems, such as, for example, self similarity of deep convection, tropical radiative convective equilibrium, among others. The easy-to-use-model philosophy and ability to run on hundreds of processors have made SAM quite popular among cloud modelers; in fact, SAM has been used by more than a dozen scientists in the United States and Canada and helped to generate quite a few publications. I put together the first realistic GCM with cloud-resolving model in place of conventional sub-grid scale parameterizations. The resultent model is known as the Multiscale Modeling Framework (MMF). The prototype MMF has thousands of CRM models running simultaneously; in each GCM grid cell, the CRM (a.k.a. 'super-parameterization') simulates the thermodynamic tendencies due to precipitating clouds evolving in response to GCM large-scale forcing and radiation heating rates computed independently in each CRM column. The model is used to study cloud climate sensitivities, Madden-Julian Oscillation, aerosol effects on climate.