Subtropical Marine Low Clouds and Surface Wind Distributions: Representations of Boundary Layer Cloudiness and Surface Wind Probability Distributions ... Marine Stratus and Stratocumulus Regions

This book is designed to represent subtropical marine stratus and stratocumulus (MSC) and surface winds in a simple but physical consistent way, which has applications in climate modeling and offshore wind energy development. A simple low cloud cover scheme is developed in Chapter 2, in which the variation of MSC is formulated by connecting low cloud amount with lower tropospheric stability (LTS), large-scale subsidence, and dynamical transport of available dry inhibition energy below trade wind inversion. The new scheme produces realistic seasonal and inter-annual variations of MSC amounts and systematically reduces the NCAR CAM3.1 model biases as shown in Chapter 3. The lower troposphere available thermal inhibition energy is also shown in Chapter 4 to be a skillful predictor in diagnosing MSC in monthly and seasonal time-scales. The influence of MSC, ocean SST, and large-scale divergence on surface wind probability distribution are addressed in Chapter 5 using satellite observations and a simple stochastic model, which can successfully reproduce the observed mean, the standard deviation, and skewness of surface wind speeds in the southeast Pacific.