2.1. Radiation
The Morcrette radiation scheme from ECMWF’s IFS (Integrated Forecasting System) cycle 25R1 is the default shortwave (SW) radiation scheme in HARMONIE–AROME and contains six spectral intervals. The default longwave (LW) radiation scheme uses the Rapid Radiative Transfer Model (RRTM) of Mlawer et al. [
3] and contains 16 spectral bands. Both the SW and LW schemes are described in the IFS [
4] and the mesoscale research model Meso-NH [
5] documentation. Because of computational constraints the full radiation calculations are currently performed every 15 minutes. An alternative broadband radiation scheme called ACRANEB2 [
6,
7] is also available in the model, though not used operationally by default. Comparisons over Finland have demonstrated a general agreement of the clear-sky SW and LW radiation fluxes at the surface between the default radiation scheme and ACRANEB2 [
8,
9]. Further details on the use of these schemes in HARMONIE-AROME are described in Bengtsson et al. [
1] with new developments since then described here, in particular the following three changes: 1) the inclusion of Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Service (CAMS) near-real time (NRT) aerosols, 2) changes regarding the cloud droplet number concentration, and 3) changes to the LW cloud liquid optical property parametrization.
The radiative transfer calculations use the following inherent optical properties (IOPs) of cloud particles, aerosols and atmospheric gases: optical thickness, single scattering albedo (SSA) and asymmetry factor (g). Regarding cloud particles we mean prognostic specific cloud liquid and cloud ice content. The aerosols consist of monthly climatologies and the atmospheric gases consist of prognostic H
O, a fixed composition mixture of CO
, N
O, CH
, and O
and monthly climatologies of O
). By default, the Tegen aerosol climatology [
10]) consisting of vertically integrated aerosol optical depths (AOD) of land, sea, desert, and urban tropospheric aerosols at a wavelength of 550 nm (AOD550) are used in the radiative transfer calculations, along with prescribed constant background tropospheric and stratospheric aerosols.
The first new radiation-related development described here is the use of NRT aerosol concentration data, provided by CAMS as suggested by [
11]. These data are now included in both for radiation and cloud microphysics parametrizations (
Section 2.5), while in the default system the climatological AOD550s only influence the radiative transfer meaning that the use of aerosols in radiation and microphysics is not consistent in the older configuration. Three-dimensional NRT aerosol mass mixing ratio (MMR, unit kg kg
) fields are introduced via the first guess and lateral boundary conditions (LBC) of the model, and advected by the model dynamics. 14 aerosol species are included: 3 sea salt species (fine, jet and spume drop modes), 3 desert dust (fine, coarse and supercoarse) 2 organic matter (hydrophilic and hydrophobic), 2 black carbon (hydrophilic and hydrophobic), one Sulfate, 2 Nitrate (fine and coarse mode) and Ammonium. All aerosols can be removed by wet deposition, while the coarser modes can also be removed by dry sedimentation. With the exception of sea salt emissions, aerosol sources or generation mechanisms are not yet implemented in HARMONIE-AROME.
Three-dimensional AOD550 fields are obtained for the radiation calculations from the NRT aerosol MMR fields using the mass extinction (ME) coefficients (provided by [
12]) for 11 species. A relative humidity of 80 % is assumed for conversion of the MMRs to AOD fields, AOD550(x,y,z,species) = MMR(x,y,z,species) x ME(humidity,wavelength,species). 11 species are used, as opposed to the 14 mentioned in the previous paragraph, because currently the nitrate and ammonium aerosols are not included in the radiation calculations. The AOD550s are grouped into the same general categories as the Tegen species, to enable these to be readily used by the default radiation scheme. In addition to ME, the values of the single-scattering albedo and asymmetry factor and the spectral distributions of all aerosol inherent optical properties (AIOPs) are, as previously, prescribed. Note also that the cloud optical property parametrizations [
1] remain unchanged when aerosol MMRs are introduced.
The impact of aerosols on SW radiation was found to be large in the case of desert dust intrusions as shown in
Figure 1 and
Figure 2. Generally in clear sky cases, SW radiation was found to be slightly underestimated with NRT aerosols compared to when the Tegen climatology is used.
Figure 1 shows a mostly clear-sky dust example that occurred on the 20th of February 2023 over the Iberian Peninsula, where Saharan dust reduced the global SW radiation by nearly 100 W/m
at some stations. The daily mean global radiation for Tegen (REFERENCE) and CAMS NRT aerosol experiments is shown in
Figure 1. Hourly global radiation is shown in
Figure 2 compared with observations, where the global radiation forecast is overestimated by the REFERENCE Tegen experiment, while the introduction of NRT aerosols reduces the global radiation to values similar to those observed.
The second new radiation-related development described in this section concerns cloud droplet number concentration. Radiation schemes are known to be sensitive to the definition of cloud ice and water particle sizes. The optical density of a cloud of a given total water content distributed to a multitude of small droplets is significantly larger than that of a cloud consisting of fewer larger droplets. The cloud droplet number concentration (CDNC) can be used to calculate the cloud liquid droplet effective radius (r
) for the radiation scheme. In CY46, for consistency reasons, the CDNC used in the radiation and microphysical schemes is the same; this wasn’t the case in CY40, where the prescribed continental and marine aerosol coefficients were different in both schemes. A vertical profile of CDNC is used now in place of the coefficients and is described in
Section 2.5 along with other details.
The remainder of this section is dedicated to the third radiation-related development concerning LW cloud liquid optical properties. Long-standing issues forecasting fog in HARMONIE-AROME (fog was too dense, too cold and too widespread) led to a Masters thesis by Tosca Kettler in collaboration with KNMI [
13]. Her study, primarily using MUSC, investigated the strong cooling of the fog layer and a possible link with LW optical depth. By default, the [
14] LW effective emissivity,
, was used in HARMONIE-AROME as described in Equation 1:
where
L is the integrated cloud liquid water path (LWP), 0.144 is an empirically fitted coefficient, and 1.2 and -0.006 are coefficients that describe the linear dependence on the effective radius (
). 1.66 is the diffusivity factor [
15]. The 0.144 coefficient
1 was shown to be too high when [
13] used data from the Cabauw supersite to derive a more realistic LW effective emissivity as shown in
Figure 3 (coefficient of -0.096 instead of -0.144). This effective LW emissivity was derived from downward LW radiative fluxes at the top of the Cabauw tower and at the surface. An empirical relationship was then derived between the effective emissivity and the LWP calculated from visibility measurements at 6 levels in the Cabauw tower. In addition to the LW radiation, the cloud droplet number concentration was found to be very important regarding the fog problems (see
Section 2.5 for more details).
Theoretical analyses using Mie computations for the LW spectrum confirmed that the HARMONIE-AROME LW cloud emissivity was indeed too high. The results of these calculations for the 16 LW spectral bands in the radiation scheme are shown in
Figure 4. Here, it can be seen that the Kettler parametrization fits the theoretical results well for wavelength bands 8, 9 and 10 and the smallest, and most common, cloud droplet sizes. These spectral bands are the most important for the cloud LW radiative effects, as they are least affected by greenhouse gas absorption. However, in an atmosphere with highly variable water vapour concentrations, the important wavelength bands vary. Thus, a LW cloud emissivity parametrization using a single coefficient is not ideal. A new LW cloud liquid optical property scheme, the Nielsen scheme (personal communication), was developed, where the 16 LW spectral band cloud liquid droplet mass absorption coefficients were parametrized based on Mie-Debye theory. This parametrization is given in Equation 2, where n(r
) is the spectral band mass absorption coefficient, r
is the cloud droplet effective radius and a
-g
are the coefficients for each LW spectral band, as detailed in
Table 1.
2.2. Convection
[
16] did a comprehensive integral revision of three parameterisation schemes in the HARMONIE-AROME model that collectively parameterise boundary layer processes: the cloud scheme, the turbulence scheme, and the shallow cumulus convection scheme. These updates mean that the CY46 cloud, turbulence and convection schemes differ significantly from the implementation described in [
1]. An insight to these model updates on subgrid-scale responses, as well as on the grid-scale, for a cold air outbreak (CAO) case is described in [
17]. In this section we focus on convection, where the biggest change involves the coupling of the convection and the turbulence schemes.
At a grid spacing of 2.5 km, deep convection is expected to be roughly resolved and explicitly represented by the model’s non-hydrostatic dynamics. HARMONIE–AROME therefore does not parameterize deep convection. However, shallow convection still needs to be parameterised. The shallow convection scheme in HARMONIE-AROME applies a dual mass flux framework [
18] in which two updrafts are distinguished: a dry updraft that does not enter the cloud layer as a saturated updraft, and a moist updraft that reaches the lifting condensation level (LCL) and continues its ascent in the cloud layer. The shallow convection scheme is described in detail by [
16] where all the modifications compared to the CY40 configuration [
1] are included. One of the most important modifications concerns the coupling of the convection and the turbulence schemes via the so-called energy cascade term. The lateral mixing term from the prognostic mass flux vertical velocity variance equation [
19] is used as a source term in the turbulent kinetic energy (TKE) equation. This particularly enhances the subcloud-to-cloud layer transport in better correspondence with Large Eddy Simulation (LES) results for shallow convection - see [
16] and
Figure 5 which shows the total turbulent transport of moisture
according to the DALES LES model, HARMONIE-AROME with an energy cascade and HARMONIE-AROME without an energy cascade. In the case of HARMONIE-AROME,
is the sum of the transport by the turbulence and convection schemes, whereas for the LES model the total turbulent transport consists of the resolved turbulent transport and a small sub-grid part. These total turbulent fluxes are most important because the vertical divergence of them determines the tendencies of the corresponding prognostic variables.
Figure 5 reveals that like the LES model, the version with the energy cascade term describes the increasing moisture transport with height (i.e., drying) in the sub-cloud layer. This results in a much better representation of the ventilation of the sub-cloud layer and moistening of the cloud layer.
2.3. Turbulence
In this section we focus on the turbulence scheme where changes have been made to improve the forecasts of low cloud. Another turbulence-related update since CY40 is the inclusion of a wind farm parametrization in the model.
HARMONIE-AROME releases since CY36 use the HARATU (HArmonie with RAcmo TUrbulence) [
1,
16,
20] turbulence scheme in place of the CBR (Cuxart-Bougeault-Redelsperger) scheme [
21]. Both schemes combine a prognostic equation for turbulent kinetic energy (TKE) with a diagnostic length scale. Although the HARMONIE-AROME model significantly improved on several aspects of the turbulence scheme with the transition to HARATU (see [
1,
22,
23]), HARATU also contributed to an underestimation of low cloud cover and an overestimation of cloud base heights. In the comprehensive integral approach mentioned earlier the turbulence scheme was revised to substantially improve on forecasts of low clouds in particular (see
Figure 6). This figure shows the frequency bias of cloud base height classes for one month using the CY40 reference [
1] (left panel), and with the modifications of [
16] (right panel). The blue, green, and orange lines refer to +3, +24, and +48h forecasts, respectively. In the reference CY40 version
forecasts contain fewer than 20% (y-axis) of the observed number of cloud base heights of around 178 feet (x-axis). The updated version on the right panel clearly improves the climatology of low cloud base heights. Two modifications to the turbulence scheme are most relevant to the improved low cloud climatology. The first involved a re-tuning of the scheme based on the Monin–Obukhov similarity theory, following [
24] and [
25]. The second involved changing the free asymptotic mixing length. One of the key consequences of these modifications is a better conservation of atmospheric inversion strengths. Consequently, stratocumulus clouds are better preserved but, for example, the triggering of deep precipitating convection is also influenced [
16].
Figure 6.
Frequency bias of the cloud base height in feet (1 ft is 0.3048 m) for December 2018 with (a) CY40 [
1] and (b) CY40 with the updates in [
16] as applied in CY43 and CY46. The blue, green, and orange lines refer to +3, +24, and +48h forecasts, respectively. Note the extreme underestimation of cloud bases around 178 ft (approximately 54 m) in CY40. Fewer than 20% of the observed number of cases are actually predicted in +24h CY40 forecasts, with a clear improvement seen when the latest changes were introduced. European Geosciences Union 2022, from Figure 20 of [
16].
Figure 6.
Frequency bias of the cloud base height in feet (1 ft is 0.3048 m) for December 2018 with (a) CY40 [
1] and (b) CY40 with the updates in [
16] as applied in CY43 and CY46. The blue, green, and orange lines refer to +3, +24, and +48h forecasts, respectively. Note the extreme underestimation of cloud bases around 178 ft (approximately 54 m) in CY40. Fewer than 20% of the observed number of cases are actually predicted in +24h CY40 forecasts, with a clear improvement seen when the latest changes were introduced. European Geosciences Union 2022, from Figure 20 of [
16].
The second important development regarding turbulence involves the introduction of a wind farm parametrization (WFP). As investment in renewable energy is increasing, wind turbines are increasingly a part of the European landscape. In order to model the effect that these (large) wind turbines have on the atmosphere a WFP was introduced in HARMONIE-AROME. Van Stratum et al. [
26] described the initial implementation of the WFP and showed an evaluation using one year of HARMONIE-AROME simulations. The parameterisation alters the tendencies of momentum (
U) and TKE by:
These equations are solved for each model level (k), where U is the two wind components (u and v), , A is the rotor area, and is the volume of the grid cell. The WFP requires thrust coefficients () and power coefficients () for each wind speed and each wind turbine. The remainder of the energy extracted from momentum, that is not converted to power, is transferred to turbulent kinetic energy, with = - .
2.5. Cloud Microphysics
The microphysical core in HARMONIE-AROME is a one-moment bulk scheme containing three different classes of ice parameterization based on developments originally done in Meso-NH [
29,
30]. This classification is commonly referred to as "ICE3". These three classes of ice, the solid hydrometeors, are snow, cloud ice and a combination of hail and graupel. In addition, three liquid or gaseous hydrometeors of rain, cloud water and water vapour are taken into account. All of the these hydrometeors are represented by prognostic mixing ratios and advected by the model dynamics; horizontally by the semi-Lagrangian scheme [
31] and vertically by the sedimentation process [
32]. The grid box-wise particle sizes are estimated from a generalized Gamma distribution.
This section on cloud microphysics is split into four subsections covering the following developments: 1) changes to the CDNC important for fog and clouds in general, 2) the use of NRT aerosols in microphysics, 3) the OCDN2 option in the HARMONIE-AROME version of ICE3, and 4) ICE-T which focuses on improving the representation of supercooled liquid (SCL).
2.5.1. Cloud Droplet Number Concentration
As described in more depth in
Section 2.1, by default HARMONIE-AROME does not predict aerosol concentrations in the forecast. Therefore, microphysically important variables such as the number concentration of cloud condensation nuclei, cloud droplets, and ice crystals, are prescribed by default. The prescribed values are either height dependent, as described in Contreras Osorio et al. [
33] or approximated process-wise.
By default, the CDNC in HARMONIE-AROME CY46 now has a vertical dependence on height, with the same profile used over land and sea areas. The reason for using the same profile was to eliminate the artificial reduction in stratiform precipitation that used occur at the land sea boundaries due to the use of different CDNCs. A reference concentration of is considered at a pressure of 1000 . The concentration increases linearly with pressure at a rate of , where P is the pressure at each model level. A reduction to CDNC is applied at the lowest model level, where the concentration is multiplied by a factor of - this was done to improve the forecasting of low visibility and fog because using the same CDCN profile over land and sea led to too much fog over the sea areas. Prior to CY43 constant values of CDNC were used for all model levels, with a value of 500 cm for urban areas, 300 cm for land areas and 100 cm over the sea/ocean. These values were shown to result in an over-estimation of fog, and an overestimation of cloud condensate in the lowest thickest clouds.
An example of the issue with the condensate in low thick clouds is shown in
Figure 8 where an MSG visible satellite image for 12 Z on July 8th 2019 is shown along with the MSG Seviri cloud water path product from KNMI and output from two HARMONIE-AROME experiments, one with default CY43 settings (CDNCs of 500 cm
, 300 cm
and 100 cm
over urban, land and sea areas respectively) and the other with a CDNC of 50 cm
everywhere and at all vertical levels (this was later replaced by the profile discussed above), and the LW effective emissivity suggested by Kettler [
13]. It is clear from
Figure 8 that the cloud water path was overestimated in the default CY43 using the old CDNC and LW effective emissivity. A CDNC of 50 cm
, with a re-tuned LW effective emissivity gave much better results. The most recent configuration in CY46 (profile of CDNC and the Nielsen 2020 LW cloud liquid optical property scheme) also shows significant improvements in the cloud water path (not shown). Further experiments led to the use of a CDNC profile as described above and the Kettler [
13] LW effective emissivity tuning was replaced by the more robust Nielsen LW cloud liquid optical property scheme.
2.5.2. Use of CAMS NRT Aerosols in ICE3
A configuration to use the three-dimensional aerosol MMRs in the cloud-precipitation microphysics was introduced by [
11] but is not yet a default option. See
Section 2.1 for the description of the aerosol species that are introduced in the forecast model for both radiation and cloud microphysics parametrizations. The key variable derived from the aerosol fields is the CDNC. Estimations of CDNC are based on the Köhler theory. Hydrophilic aerosols (sea salt, sulfates, nitrates, ammonium and hydrophilic organic matter and black carbon) are activated under supersaturated conditions. The supersaturation within clouds is calculated based on thermodynamical variables and the vertical velocity. Furthermore, the CDNC is used in the parametrization of various processes leading to the growth of activated cloud droplets to liquid and solid precipitation, as discussed in
Section 2.5.3 and
Section 2.5.4.
Case studies [
11,
34] show that precipitation, in particular the phase of the precipitation - snow, graupel, rain, is affected by the introduction of aerosol MMRs in the cloud microphysics. Changes in cloud distribution and optical thickness lead to changes in the surface radiation fluxes in cloudy cases.
Figure 9 shows 1D histograms of observed versus modelled clear sky index (CSI) for Tegen and CAMS NRT aerosol experiments, where the clear sky index is the ratio of the clear sky global SW radiation and the observed or modelled global SW radiation (the lowest values thus correspond to cloudy conditions, with values close to 1 representing clearer skies). SW radiation observations from 20 synoptic sites around Ireland were used, along with corresponding model data for the same locations. The results for a 2 week Summer period (June 1st to 14th 2018) are shown on the left, with a Winter period (February 3rd to 17th 2020) shown on the right. A clear overestimation of low CSI in the Tegen experiment can be seen in both seasons, consistent with an overestimation of cloud condensate in the thickest clouds (shown in
Figure 8). This overestimation of low CSI is not present when CAMS NRT aerosols are used.
In the case of CAMS NRT aerosols a general overestimation is seen in global SW radiation in
Figure 10, where the positive and negative biases are plotted on the positive axis to highlight whether an experiment results in more positive or negative biases overall. These biases were calculated for the same 20 stations as before. It is clear that in the Tegen experiments (both Summer and Winter; left figures) there are negative biases overall, with positive biases overall when CAMS NRT aerosols are used (right figures). Note that the differences arise from the impact of the aerosols in both the radiation and the microphysics schemes.
2.5.3. OCND2
As described in [
1] and [
35] ICE3 was supplemented with an option called OCND2 due to weaknesses found in relation to stable boundary layer conditions over Northern Europe, where the model generated ice too quickly when supercooled liquid was expected. Spurious fog was also produced at temperatures below -20
C. The major reason for such systematic model deficiencies is linked to the treatment of mixed-phase and pure ice clouds. As well as with the OCND2 option, the treatment of supercooled liquid was also improved by upgrading ICE3 to ICE-T as described in Sub
Section 2.5.4. In particular, the following aspects of the ICE3 microphysics parametrization were modified under OCND2 in order to address weaknesses:
The separation between liquid water processes and ice water processes was improved. This means that the statistical cloud scheme (See
Section 2.4) only deals with cloud liquid water, including cases when temperatures are below freezing. Thus, all ice processes are taken care of by the OCND2 version of the ICE3 scheme.
Evaporation/deposition of cloud ice water is a conversion between ice and vapour and not between ice and liquid.
The deposition rate of the ice water species was reduced.
The cloud cover, from the point of view of users of the forecast (the public), was modified to account for the lower optical thickness of ice clouds compared to water clouds.
The ice number concentration was reduced between temperatures of C and C. The main purpose of this is to slow down the conversion from cloud liquid water to ice, snow or graupel.
To support the production of supercooled rain, threshold values were introduced for converting supercooled rain into graupel or snow
Avoid calculations of saturation pressure when the saturation pressure is near or above atmospheric pressure. This is done just for technical reasons, and affects calculations in the Stratosphere only.
In order to save computing time, the ICE3 scheme should be active only when any non-vapour water species are present above a low threshold, or when the air temperature is below freezing. Unfortunately, this did not always happen when the second criteria was satisfied. This occasionally led to spurious square-like ice-clouds where areas with sufficient water species are surrounded by areas with too little cloud ice water, as shown in
Figure 11. A fix has now been implemented.
With OCND2, the microphysics scheme is more "liquid friendly", which means that supercooled droplets do not freeze as quickly. However, it is still not "liquid friendly" enough. There are cases where supercooled clouds seem to disappear too quickly. Therefore, an extension of the OCND2 scheme labeled "ICE-T" has been developed and is described in Sub
Section 2.5.4.
2.5.4. ICE-T
The development of ICE-T was motivated by the estimation of ice loads on transmission lines from atmospheric icing. When using the supercooled liquid water (SCL) from HARMONIE-AROME simulations for the estimation of ice loads, it was found that, despite the efforts made with "OCND2", the model still had a tendency to glaciate the clouds prematurely, and hence underestimate ice loads on transmission lines [
36]. Elements from the Thompson microphysics scheme [
37] found in the Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) model, were implemented in the ICE3 microphysics with the OCND2-option active. The name of the new option is called ICE-T, and reflects the combination of ICE3 and the Thompson scheme. The changes are described in detail in [
38], but the most prominent ones are listed below:
Stricter conditions for ice nucleation.
Less efficient collision-collection of liquid water by solid hydrometeors.
A variable rain intercept parameter, which allows for smaller droplets when condensation and coalescence are the primary sources.
ICE-T was tested in two studies regarding atmospheric icing on power lines [
36] and aircraft [
39]. The results show a clear shift towards more SCL water. However, the atmospheric content of ice species is also increased. This is due to a shift from graupel to snow, and since snow has a slower terminal fall speed than graupel, the residence time, and hence accumulated amount, is increased. There is an increase in surface precipitation as snow, and a decrease in graupel. The total precipitation is reduced by a few percent, and the precipitation pattern is shifted from the upstream to the lee side of topography.
Both studies found that the increased SCL was in better correspondence with observations of ice loads, measurements of atmospheric content of liquid and ice water by satellites, and pilot reports of experienced aircraft icing. The shift in the precipitation pattern is less beneficial and needs to be explored further.
ICE-T was tested during a helicopter measurement campaign launched from Alta, Norway, in April 2023. The campaign was lead by Airbus in order to test their helicopters’ ability to fly through heavy icing conditions. On April 19th 2023, heavy icing conditions inside lenticularis clouds occurred over the mountainous areas in the vicinity of Alta. The helicopter was equipped with a Cloud Droplet Probe (CDP), which measures hydrometeors in the range of , which are essentially cloud droplets. During an afternoon flight they measured liquid water content of mostly 0.8 gm and above. The highest value measured was about 1.3 gm.
Two parallel simulations were carried out using CY46, one with the default ICE3 and the OCND2 switch active, here called DEF, and one where ICE-T was active, called ICE-T. The simulations were initialised on April 19th 00:00 UTC, with no upper-air data assimilation.
Figure 12 shows cloud water content for both simulations and the difference between them, at model level 41 corresponding to approximately 820 hPa, where the helicopter encountered the heaviest icing conditions. Overall, the ICE-T simulation has higher cloud water content than DEF, and is closer to what was observed by the CDP.
Figure 12.
Simulated cloud liquid water content in the Alta region for model level 41 (approximately 820 hPa) at 14:00 UTC April 19th 2023 for DEF (left), ICE-T (middle) and the difference (right).
Figure 12.
Simulated cloud liquid water content in the Alta region for model level 41 (approximately 820 hPa) at 14:00 UTC April 19th 2023 for DEF (left), ICE-T (middle) and the difference (right).