Clouds play a critical role in the Earth system, due to their importance for precipitation, interactions with solar radiation, and influence on visibility and electromagnetic wave propagation. However, cloud properties are a considerable source of uncertainty in weather and climate forecasting models due to the nonlinear, multi-scale interactions between turbulence, aerosols, and microphysical processes spanning spatial scales from micrometers to tens of kilometers.

This talk will present a two-part investigation into cloud turbulence, where we focus on improving both the fundamental understanding and representation of cloud turbulence in numerical models. In the first part of the talk, we will present results from a priori tests for large eddy simulations (LES) of cloud turbulence using direct numerical simulation (DNS) data of cloudy, turbulent Rayleigh-Bénard convection with Lagrangian microphysics. DNS data is used to assess the fidelity of several candidate models of the sub-grid-scale supersaturation variance, which represents the influence of unresolved small-scale turbulent fluctuations of supersaturation to droplet growth. In the second part of the talk, we use an ensemble of LES to examine how large-scale cloud properties and morphology in the marine boundary layer are influenced by perturbations in environmental forcings. Together, these complementary approaches offer critical insights into cloud sensitivity while highlighting clear pathways to advance sub-grid-scale parameterizations in atmospheric models.

Dr. Scott Salesky is an Associate Professor and the Associate Director for Graduate Studies in the School of Meteorology at the University of Oklahoma. His research focuses on atmospheric turbulence, with a particular emphasis on atmospheric boundary layer structure and dynamics, cloud turbulence, and particle-laden flows using a combination of observations, theory, and high-resolution numerical modeling. He received his PhD in Meteorology from The Pennsylvania State University in 2014. His work is supported by the National Science Foundation, the US Department of Energy, and the Air Force Office of Scientific Research, including an NSF CAREER award.