Abstract
Radiative-Convective equilibrium states (RCE) are examples of statistical equilibrium states of a convective atmosphere. What is a statistically stable state for convection is shown with 2 cloud resolving models: the 3D CRM ARPS (Xue at al., 2000) and the System of Atmospheric Modeling (Khairoutdinov and Randall, 2003).
The models were used to perform idealized experiments on the development and structural organization of convection in environments at radiative-convective equilibrium. These experiments are modeled as other similar experiments that aim to study the aggregation of convection and its variability as in Bretherton et al. (2005). The aim of these experiments is to study the robustness of the statistical states of equilibrium given the different prognostic variables used by the models and the different physical parameterizations for turbulent fluxes, mixing and radiation used as model forcing to simulate the effect of moisture and temperature on the convection dynamics. Starting from the common state with self-aggregation of the two models, a comparison between the two environment is shown. The SAM model is the base for the climate model SP-CAM, (Super-parameterized CAM), where a column version of SAM is embedded in each grid column of CAM to replace conventional parameterizations and explicitly represent sub-grid convection; some results of SPCAM are here briefly described.

Note: The seminar will be held at the CMCC premises in Bologna Viale Berti Pichat 6/2