The goal of the proposed research is to improve understanding of the two-way coupling between clouds and the large-scale atmospheric circulation at extratropical latitudes. The work includes two components. In the first component, the influence of largescale extratropical climate variability on clouds and cloud radiative effects will be analyzed. The research will include analyses of both climate model output and observations, including various CloudSat products, multiple reanalyses products, and remotely sensed estimates of atmospheric cloud radiative effects. The analyses will explore and interpret the changes in vertical cloud structure and radiative heating rates associated with variations in a range of patterns of extratropical variability.
In the second component, the response of the large-scale extratropical circulation to atmospheric cloud radiative effects will be examined. In the process, the impact of atmospheric cloud radiative effects on the structure, amplitude, and timescale of patterns of large-scale extratropical atmospheric variability will be explored. The analyses will exploit output from the Clouds On/Off Klima Intercomparsion Experiments (COOKIE), which include numerical simulations run with and without atmospheric cloud radiative effects. They will also include numerical experiments run on the dry dynamical core of a general circulation model forced with heatings that mimic atmospheric cloud radiative effects.