Top ARM Accomplishment: Parameterizations Developed To Improve Climate Models

Summary

ARM’s most visible success story in the area of improving climate models has been the use of ARM data to create new radiation treatments, known by the acronyms RRTM (Rapid Radiative Transfer Model) and McICA (Monte Carlo Independent Column Approximation). RRTM, solidly grounded on over a decade of ARM data, is now replacing the radiation packages in most of the world’s climate models. McICA is a method for simultaneously accounting for subgrid-scale clouds and dramatically accelerating the summation over radiation wavelengths in climate models and, like RRTM, has been adopted by prominent climate models. ARM has sponsored many other improvements in climate model parameterizations, with emphasis on convection and on aerosol-cloud interactions.