Analysis of Resolved and Parameterized Vertical Transports in Convective Boundary Layers at Gray-Zone Resolutions

AbstractThe gray zone of a physical process in numerical models is defined as the range of model resolution in which the process is partly resolved by model dynamics and partly parameterized. In this study, the authors examine the grid-size dependencies of resolved and parameterized vertical transports in convective boundary layers (CBLs) for horizontal grid scales including the gray zone. To assess how stability alters the dependencies on grid size, four CBLs with different surface heating and geostrophic winds are considered. For this purpose, reference data for grid-scale (GS) and subgrid-scale (SGS) fields are constructed for 50–4000-m mesh sizes by filtering 25-m large-eddy simulation (LES) data.As relative importance of shear increases, the ratio of resolved turbulent kinetic energy increases for a given grid spacing. Vertical transports of potential temperature, momentum, and a bottom-up diffusion passive scalar behave in a similar fashion. The effects of stability are related to the horizontal sca...

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