Study Clouds in Weather Forecast Mode

As part of a CPO funded CPT with NCEP, UW and JPL, we have performed initialized forecasts experiments for the month of July 2013 with AM3 and a prototype version of AM4. Parallel simulations were performed by NCEP using GFS. Many GCM cloud biases become apparent even in relatively short simulations. As a result, the use of initialized forecast simulations could be a useful tool for evaluating clouds in high resolution models that are too expensive for routine climate simulations.