K.-M.,Xu¹, R. T. Cederwall², L. J. Donner³, W. W. Grabowski⁴, F. Guichard⁵, D. E. Johnson⁶, M. Khairoutdinov⁷, S. K. Krueger⁸, J. C. Petch⁹, D. A. Randall⁷, C. J. Seman³, W.-K. Tao⁶, D. Wang^10,1, S. C. Xie², J. J. Yio² and M.-H. Zhang¹¹

 ¹NASA Langley Research Center, Hampton, VA, USA
 ²Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Livermore, CA, USA
 ³NOAA Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory, Princeton, NJ, USA
 ⁴National Center for Atmospheric Research, Boulder, CO, USA
 ⁵Centre National de Recherches Météorologiques/GAME (CNRS & Météo-France), Toulouse, France
 ⁶NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, MD, USA
 ⁷Colorado State University, Fort Collins, CO, USA
 ⁸University of Utah, Salt Lake City, UT, USA
 ⁹The Met Office, Bracknell, UK
¹⁰Hampton University, Hampton, VA, USA
¹¹State University of New York, Stony Brook, NY, USA

Quarterly Journal of the Royal Meteorological Society, 2001, vol 128, pp. 593-624

Summary: This paper reports an intercomparison study of midlatitude continental cumulus convection simulated by eight 2-D and two 3-D cloud resolving models (CRMs), driven by observed large-scale advective temperature and moisture tendencies, surface turbulent fluxes, and radiative heating profiles during three subperiods of the Summer 1997 Intensive Observation Period (IOP) of the U.S. Department of Energy’s Atmospheric Radiation Measurement (ARM) program. Each subperiod includes two or three precipitation events of various intensities over a span of 4 or 5 days. The results can be summarized as follows.
      CRMs can reasonably simulate midlatitude continental summer convection observed at the ARM Cloud and Radiation Testbed (CART) site in terms of the intensity of convective activ-ity, and the temperature and specific humidity evolution. Delayed occurrences of the initial pre-cipitation events are a common feature for all three subcases among the models. Cloud mass fluxes, condensate mixing ratios and hydrometeor fractions produced by all CRMs are similar. Some of the simulated cloud properties such as cloud liquid water path and hydrometeor fraction are rather similar to available observations. All CRMs produce large downdraft mass fluxes with magnitudes similar to those of updrafts, in contrast with CRM results for tropical convection. Some intermodel differences in cloud properties are likely to be related to those in the parameterizations of microphysical processes.
      There is generally a good agreement between the CRMs and observations with CRMs being significantly better than single-column models (SCMs), suggesting that current results are suitable for use in improving parameterizations in SCMs. However, improvements can still be made in the CRM simulations; those include the proper initialization of the CRMs and a more proper method of diagnosing cloud boundaries in model outputs for comparison with satellite and cloud radar observations.