Moisture model choices in Atmos.jl

The moisture model in Atmos.jl describes the behavior of suspended water in the atmosphere (i.e. water vapor, cloud liquid water and cloud ice). There are three options available: DryModel, EquilMoist and NonEquilMoist.

DryModel

The DryModel assumes that air is dry and there is no water available in any form. It does not add any water related variables to state variables.

EquilMoist

The EquilMoist assumes that water is present in the air and that all of its phases are always in thermodynamic equilibrium. It employs an iterative search algorithm called saturation adjustment to find the temperature at which all water phases are in equilibrium and the corresponding q_liq and q_ice (cloud liquid water cloud ice specific humidities). It adds ρ q_tot (air density times total water specific humidity) to state variables. The q_liq and q_ice are diagnosed during output based on the temperature stored in the auxiliary state.

NonEquilMoist

The NonEquilMoist assumes that water is present in the air, its phases are in thermal equilibrium (i.e., they have the same temperature), but it does not assume that the partitioning of water into its vapor, liquid, and ice phases is in equilibrium. At each time step, the cloud liquid water and cloud ice source/sink terms are obtained as relaxation towards equilibrium over time scale that may eventually depend on factors such as the number of cloud condensation nuclei. (for details see here.) This approach does not require employing iterative algorithm and allows for supersaturation to be present in the computational domain. It adds ρ q_tot, ρ q_liq and ρ q_ice to the state variables (air density times total water, cloud liquid water and cloud ice specific humidities). Because the assumed relaxation timescale for condensation/evaporation and deposition/sublimation is small, it requires care when choosing the model timestep length.

Implementation notes

The moisture models rely on the new_thermo_state and recover_thermo_state convenience functions to create a struct that stores air properties needed to uniquely define air thermodynamic state. For the DryModel it is the PhaseDry struct that has three fields: parameter set used by the Atmos.jl model, internal energy and air density. For the EquilMoist model it is the PhaseEquil struct that has five fields: parameter set used by the Atmos.jl model, internal energy, air density, total water specific humidity and temperature at which all water phases are in equilibrium. For the NonEquilMoist model it is the PhaseNonEquil struct that has four fields: parameter set used by the Atmos.jl model, internal energy, air density and phase partition struct. All other properties, such as the speed of sound in the air, water vapor specific humidity, etc, should be computed based on the thermodynamic state struct.

The new_thermo_state function is called at the beginning of each time step in the atmos_nodal_update_auxiliary_state function. For the EquilMoist model the new_thermo_state function calls the saturation_adjustment to find the equilibrium temperature. It populates the fields of the PhaseEquil struct and saves the equilibrium air temperature into the auxiliary state. For the DryModel and NonEquilMoist model the thermodynamic state struct is created based on the current state variables. The recover_thermo_state function should be used throughout the code to create an instance of the thermodynamic state struct. For the EquilMoist model it populates the PhaseEquil fields based on the current state variables and the temperature stored in the auxiliary state. This avoids executing unnecessarily the saturation_adjustemnt algorithm. For the DryModel and NonEquilMoist model the recover_thermo_state function is the same as the new_thermo_state function and populates the corresponding struct fields based on the current state variables.