We show that in the tropics, tropical atmospheric dynamics force the subcloud moist static energy (MSE) over land and ocean to be very similar in, and only in, regions of deep convection. Using observed rainfall as a proxy for convection and reanalysis data to calculate MSE, we show that subcloud MSE in the nonconvective regions may differ…

Climate models struggle to accurately represent the highly reflective boundary layer clouds overlying the remote and stormy Southern Ocean. We use in situ aircraft observations from the Southern Ocean Clouds, Radiation and Aerosol Transport Experimental Study (SOCRATES) to evaluate Southern Ocean clouds in a cloud‐resolving large‐eddy…

The hurricane project at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory (GFDL) was established in 1970. By the mid-1970s pioneering research had led to the development of a new hurricane model. As the reputation of the model grew, GFDL was approached in 1986 by the director of the National…

Over the past decade, there has been appreciable progress towards modeling the water, energy, and carbon cycles at field scales (10–100 m) over continental to global extents in Earth system models (ESMs). One such approach, named HydroBlocks, accomplishes this task while maintaining computational efficiency via Hydrologic Response Units(HRUs),…

The hydroxyl radical (OH) is a powerful oxidant in the troposphere controlling the atmospheric lifetimes of many short-lived climate forcers such as methane. In this study, the GFDL-AM4.1 model is used to investigate the meteorological impacts on OH and the methane budget and lifetime over 1980–2017. Driven by meteorological reanalyses from the…

Simulations of baroclinic cyclones often cannot resolve moist convection but resort to convective parametrization. An exception is the hypohydrostatic rescaling, which in principle can be used to better represent convection with no increase in computational cost. The rescaling is studied in the context of a quasi-steady, convectively active,…