A. J. G. Baumgaertner

Electrified clouds are known to play a major role in the Global Electric Circuit. These clouds produce upward currents which maintain the potential difference between Earth's surface and the upper atmosphere. In this study, model output from two simulations of the Community Earth System Model (CESM) are compared with conduction currents and other data derived from the Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission (TRMM) satellite, including both the Lightning Imaging Sensor and Precipitation Radar. The intention is to determine CESM's skill at representing these microphysical and dynamical properties of clouds. Then, these cloud properties are used to develop a model parameterization to compute conduction currents from electrified clouds. Specifically, we evaluate the ability of global mean convective mass flux, ice water path, and convective precipitation to represent conduction current sources. Parameterizations using these variables yield derived global mean currents that agree well with the geographical patterns of TRMM currents. In addition, comparing the diurnal variations of modeled global mean current to the observed diurnal variations of electric potential gradient, root‐mean‐square (RMS) errors range between 6.5% and 8.1%, but the maximum occurs 4 to 6 h early in all three variables. Output currents derived from the model variables generally match well to the currents derived from TRMM, and the total global current estimates agree well with past studies. This suggests that cloud parameters are well suited for representing the global distribution and strength of currents in a global model framework.

The Community Earth System Model (CESM1), maintained by the United States National Centre for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) is connected with the Modular Earth Submodel System (MESSy). For the MESSy user community, this offers many new possibilities. The option to use the Community Atmosphere Model (CAM) atmospheric dynamical cores, especially the state-of-the-art spectral element (SE) core, as an alternative to the ECHAM5 spectral transform dynamical core will provide scientific and computational advances for atmospheric chemistry and climate modelling with MESSy. The well-established finite volume core from CESM1(CAM) is also made available. This offers the possibility to compare three different atmospheric dynamical cores within MESSy. Additionally, the CESM1 land, river, sea ice, glaciers and ocean component models can be used in CESM1/MESSy simulations, allowing the use of MESSy as a comprehensive Earth system model (ESM). For CESM1/MESSy set-ups, the MESSy process and diagnostic submodels for atmospheric physics and chemistry are used together with one of the CESM1(CAM) dynamical cores; the generic (infrastructure) submodels support the atmospheric model component. The other CESM1 component models, as well as the coupling between them, use the original CESM1 infrastructure code and libraries; moreover, in future developments these can also be replaced by the MESSy framework. Here, we describe the structure and capabilities of CESM1/MESSy, document the code changes in CESM1 and MESSy, and introduce several simulations as example applications of the system. The Supplements provide further comparisons with the ECHAM5/MESSy atmospheric chemistry (EMAC) model and document the technical aspects of the connection in detail.

A numerical model based on radial basis function-generated finite differences (RBF-FD) is developed for simulating the global electric circuit (GEC) within the Earth's atmosphere, represented by a 3-D variable coefficient linear elliptic partial differential equation (PDE) in a spherically shaped volume with the lower boundary being the Earth's topography and the upper boundary a sphere at 60 km. To our knowledge, this is (1) the first numerical model of the GEC to combine the Earth's topography with directly approximating the differential operators in 3-D space and, related to this, (2) the first RBF-FD method to use irregular 3-D stencils for discretization to handle the topography. It benefits from the mesh-free nature of RBF-FD, which is especially suitable for modeling high-dimensional problems with irregular boundaries. The RBF-FD elliptic solver proposed here makes no limiting assumptions on the spatial variability of the coefficients in the PDE (i.e., the conductivity profile), the right hand side forcing term of the PDE (i.e., distribution of current sources) or the geometry of the lower boundary.

The Community Earth System Model (CESM1), maintained by the United States National Centre for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) is connected with the Modular Earth Submodel System (MESSy). For the MESSy user community, this offers many new possibilities. The option to use the CESM1(CAM) atmospheric dynamical cores, especially the spectral element (SE) core, as an alternative to the ECHAM5 spectral transform dynamical core will provide scientific and computational advances for atmospheric chemistry and climate modelling with MESSy. The SE dynamical core does not require polar filters since the grid is quasi-uniform. By advecting the surface pressure rather then the logarithm of surface pressure the SE core locally conserves energy and mass. Furthermore, it has the possibility to scale to up to 105 compute cores, which is useful for current and future computing architectures. The well-established finite volume core from CESM1(CAM) is also made available. This offers the possibility to compare three different atmospheric dynamical cores within MESSy. Additionally, the CESM1 land, river, sea ice, glaciers and ocean component models can be used in CESM1/MESSy simulations, allowing to use MESSy as a comprehensive Earth System Model. For CESM1/MESSy setups, the MESSy process and diagnostic submodels for atmospheric physics and chemistry are used together with one of the CESM1(CAM) dynamical cores; the generic (infrastructure) submodels support the atmospheric model component. The other CESM1 component models as well as the coupling between them use the original CESM1 infrastructure code and libraries, although in future developments these can also be replaced by the MESSy framework. Here, we describe the structure and capabilities of CESM1/MESSy, document the code changes in CESM1 and MESSy, and introduce several simulations as example applications of the system. The Supplements provide further comparisons with the ECHAM5/MESSy atmospheric chemistry (EMAC) model and document the technical aspects of the connection in detail.

A numerical model based on Radial Basis Function-generated Finite Differences (RBF-FD) is developed for simulating the Global Electric Circuit (GEC) within the Earth's atmosphere, represented by a 3-D variable coefficient linear elliptic PDE in a spherically-shaped volume with the lower boundary being the Earth's topography and the upper boundary a sphere at 60 km. To our knowledge, this is (1) the first numerical model of the GEC to combine the Earth's topography with directly approximating the differential operators in 3-D space, and related to this (2) the first RBF-FD method to use irregular 3-D stencils for discretization to handle the topography. It benefits from the mesh-free nature of RBF-FD, which is especially suitable for modeling high-dimensional problems with irregular boundaries. The RBF-FD elliptic solver proposed here makes no limiting assumptions on the spatial variability of the coefficients in the PDE (i.e. the conductivity profile), the right hand side forcing term of the PDE (i.e. distribution of current sources) or the geometry of the lower boundary.

Clouds in the fair weather return path of the global electric circuit (GEC) reduce conductivity because of the limited mobility of charge due to attachment to cloud water droplets, effectively leading to a loss of ions. A high-resolution GEC model, which numerically solves the current continuity equation in combination with Ohm's law, is used to show that return currents partially flow around clouds, with current divergence above the cloud and convergence below the cloud. An analysis of this effect is presented for various types of clouds, i.e., for different altitude extents and for different horizontal dimensions, finding that the effect is most pronounced for high clouds with a diameter below 100 km. Based on these results, a method to calculate column and global resistance is developed that can account for all cloud sizes and altitudes. The CESM1(WACCM) (Community Earth System Model – Whole Atmosphere Community Climate Model) as well as ISCCP (International Satellite Cloud Climatology Project) cloud data are used to calculate the effect of this phenomenon on global resistance. From CESM1(WACCM), it is found that when including clouds in the estimate of resistance the global resistance increases by up to 73%, depending on the parameters used. Using ISCCP cloud cover leads to an even larger increase, which is likely to be overestimated because of time averaging of cloud cover. Neglecting current divergence/convergence around small clouds overestimates global resistance by up to 20% whereas the method introduced by previous studies underestimates global resistance by up to 40%. For global GEC models, a~conductivity parameterization is developed to account for the current divergence/convergence phenomenon around clouds. Conductivity simulations from CESM1(WACCM) using this parameterization are presented.

Non-electrified clouds in the fair-weather part of the Global Electric Circuit (GEC) reduce conductivity because of the limited mobility of charge due to attachment to cloud water droplets, effectively leading to a loss of ions. A high-resolution GEC model, which numerically solves the Poisson equation, is used to show that in the fair-weather region currents partially flow around non-electrified clouds, with current divergence above the cloud, and convergence below the cloud. An analysis of this effect is presented for various types of non-electrified clouds, i.e. for different altitude extents, and for different horizontal dimensions, finding that the effect is most pronounced for high clouds with a diameter below 100 km. Based on these results, a method to calculate column and global resistance is developed that can account for all cloud sizes and altitudes. The CESM1(WACCM) Earth System Model as well as ISCCP cloud data are used to calculate the effect of this phenomenon on global resistance. From CESM1(WACCM), it is found that when including non-electrified clouds in the fair-weather estimate of resistance the global resistance increases by up to 73%, depending on the parameters used. Using ISCCP cloud cover leads to an even larger increase, which is likely to be overestimated because of time-averaging of cloud cover. Neglecting current divergence/convergence around small clouds overestimates global resistance by up to 20%, whereas the method introduced by previous studies underestimates global resistance by up to 40%. For global GEC models, a conductivity parametrization is developed to account for the current divergence/convergence phenomenon around non-electrified clouds. Conductivity simulations from CESM1(WACCM) using this parametrization are presented.