Some more on our planned activities this year - also available from the website, http://www.convection.info/blclouds/

First, see Minghua's annoucement below giving details of the workshop in March on the current "CGILS" intercomparison case. I would again encourage anyone who has not yet looked at this case to do so and to contribute to this important research area.

Second, although not formally a BL clouds group meeting, I would encourage those of you who can to attend the GCSS Microphysics meeting at the University of Washington in June (as announced in Ben Shipway's email on Monday). Microphysics remains a key uncertain process in boundary layer clouds and its role and parametrization in stratocumulus and shallow cumulus will be topics at this meeting.

Third, for several years now there has been much interest in the group in performing an intercomparison based around the marine sub-tropical transition of stratocumulus to trade cumulus. Stephan de Roode and Irina Sandu have been making good progress with setting up cases of this sort and plan to release the details by the spring, discussing the results at a meeting later in 2010 or early 2011. So, more on this soon.

The objective of this meeting is to understand the physical mechanism of cloud feedbacks in climate models that participate in the CGILS case study (http://atmgcm.msrc.sunysb.edu/cfmip_figs/Case_specification.html), with the goal of interpreting climate sensitivities of AR5 models. Specifically, the meeting will focus on

(1) how the parameterized processes (PBL, stratiform, convective, radiative) behave and interact to produce clouds in the SCMs
(2) what are the physical mechanisms of cloud feedback in the individual SCMs
(3) what can be learned from the LESs
(4) how can the LES results be used to constrain SCMs
(5) how to extrapolate the CGILS results to cloud feedbacks and climate sensitivities of the GCMs

Each participating group has been invited to make presentations for an in-depth analysis of its CGILS results. The presentations will cover all three CGILS locations (shallow cumulus, stratocumulus and stratus, at locations s6, s11, s12) , although emphasis will be for location s11 where LES results are available.

The meeting is open to public, but only presentations related to the meeting objectives are invited. If you do not belong to a participating group and wish to make a presentation, please send an email to Minghua Zhang (mzhang@notes.cc.sunysb.edu).