ParaChute - Representing turbulence in models

Weather and climate models have been critical to society’s ability to reduce the impacts of hazardous weather, helping to inform decisions on adapting to climate change, and provide advance warning of high-impact weather. The accuracy and value of these models can be improved by increasing their horizontal resolution so that grid boxes are kilometres, or in some cases hundreds of metres in length, giving better representation of the surface terrain and simultaneously capturing cloud-scale motions and long-range atmospheric flows. By moving to km and sub-km resolutions, turbulent processes in the atmosphere start to become partially resolved, with energy needing to be exchanged between the resolved grid and the sub-grid physics (a difficult problem known as modelling in the “grey zone”). In addition, as turbulent motions are inherently stochastic, weather forecasts and climate models carry chaotic uncertainty that needs to be quantified in order to provide value to decision makers.

Methods for modelling turbulence in this “grey zone” are still in their infancy, with key problems being the lack of model convergence at different resolutions, and the unrealistic emergence of structures (aliasing) onto the grid scale, leading to systematic biases in projections. A faithful representation of the grey zone is vital for ensuring the accuracy of predictions of severe weather.

ParaChute was initiated as part of the Partnerships and Opportunities Programme between the UKRI and the Met Office. Joint funding is £11m over four years, starting in February 2023. It involves researchers from the Universities of Exeter, Leeds, Reading, Manchester and Imperial College. 

Project areas

As a result of a call from NERC, five projects were selected to form the NERC contribution to the programme. These are:

WOEST (PI: Ryan Neely, NCAS, University of Leeds). This project was designed to supplement and complement the Met Office WesCon observational campaign, which took place in Summer 2023. It targets precipitating convective cores; measurement of the eddy dissipation rate; and conditions linked to the pre-convective environment and its variability.

Hi-Fi (PI: George Efstathiou, University of Exeter). This project aims to develop a dynamically-adjusting length scale for closing turbulence models, eventually coupling it to higher-order turbulence representations.

UMBRELLA (PI: Andrew Ross, University of Leeds). This aims to evaluate current and future boundary layer schemes in the grey zone, and to understand how to include the effects of heterogeneity and topography into future schemes.

MORPH (PI: Bob Plant, University of Reading). This project aims to contribute to the inclusion of stochastic and scale-aware behaviour in CoMorph, targetting km scales. It will also work on steps towards unification between mass-flux and turbulence schemes.

CloudyTime (PI: Thorwald Stein, University of Reading). This project aims to evaluate observations from WesCon with modelled convective turbulence; investigate introducing turbulence-microphysics coupling; and assess controls on predictability over the WesCon domain.

The NERC-funded projects have been combined with work-packages from the Met Office to form an overall programme, led by Alison Stirling and Humphrey Lean at the Met Office, that is divided into six working groups, with the following aims:

1. WesCon-WOEST observational campaign

An observational campaign called WesCon was conducted in Summer 2023 to inform understanding and representation of turbulence in a variety of conditions. This campaign underpins the modelling and evaluation that will be used in ParaChute.

2. Turbulent Grey Zone

The aim of this working group is to produce a new representation of turbulent mixing that better represents the transfer of energy across the grey-zone. 

3. Convective Grey Zone

The aim of this working group is to produce a scale-aware, stochastic representation of convection at km scales that works seamlessly with the turbulence scheme and improves precipitation structures and the thermodynamic state at km scales. 

4. Microphysical Interactions with Turbulence

Here, we aim to explore inclusion of a more direct link between turbulent collisions and the precipitation accretion process. 

5. Physics-Dynamics Coupling

This working group aims to quantify the role of the dynamics representation in representing turbulent processes 

6. Predictability

This working group aims to quantify the upscale transfer of uncertainty due to turbulent processes, and use to develop new methods for creating ensembles.