Japan Geoscience Union Meeting 2018

convener:Kentaroh Suzuki(Atmosphere and Ocean Research Institute, University of Tokyo), Yukari Takayabu(Atmosphere and Ocean Research Institute, the University of Tokyo), Hirohiko Masunaga

Clouds and precipitation are among the largest uncertainties in weather predictions and climate projections. To overcome this difficulty, substantial progresses are required in understandings of cloud and precipitation processes and their interactions with large-scale environment. Such progresses, however, have been hampered by historical separation of the science community into two, namely, one for clouds and the other for precipitation, despite the fact that clouds and precipitation are inseparable phenomena.
This session aims to integrate various studies of clouds and precipitation across the two communities over different spatial and temporal scales. A particular focus is placed on better understandings of fundamental processes governing the cloud and precipitation phenomena and their multi-scale interactions with environment through dynamical, thermodynamical and radiative processes. A wide variety of studies with theoretical, modeling and observational approaches are solicited in this session to seek a novel way for combining different methodologies to obtain unified, holistic understandings of the cloud and precipitation systems. The solicited area of research includes but is not limited to cloud microphysics, cloud-radiation interaction, convection dynamics, meso-scale phenomena and various multi-scale interactions including tropical aggregation of clouds, by means of a breadth of approaches encompassing in-situ and satellite observations, theoretical process studies and numerical modeling. Through discussion of presented papers, the session is also intended to enhance collaborations among different disciplines and communities for substantially advancing our understandings of cloud and precipitation processes.