Boundary layer aspects of Marine Stratocumulus Clouds such as the breakup of stratocumulus clouds by Cloud-Top Entrainment Instability (CTEI), the transition from stratiform cloud to cumulus cloud, and turbulent fluxes in marine stratocumulus clouds are reviewed by Moeng and LeMone in this issue. Due to the recent field programs focussed on marine stratocumulus clouds (First ISCPP Regional Experiment (FIRE), summer 1987) and the Atlantic Stratocumulus Transition Experiment (ASTEX), a large number of papers have appeared in the literature on this cloud type. In the following we review some selected results.
A number of studies focussed on the radiative properties of marine stratocumulus clouds (Duda et al. [1991], Nakajima et al. [1991], and Minnis et al. [1992]). In general, these studies show fairly good agreement with remotely sensed inferences of effective cloud droplet radius and in-situ verification data. The study by Rogers and Koracin [1992] showed the effects of longwave and shortwave radiative heating on the coupling between stratocumulus clouds and the boundary layer using a one-dimensional (1-D) model of stratocumulus clouds. They showed that shortwave heating directly offsets the net longwave cooling near cloud top by as much as 30%, reducing or eliminating the overall cooling of the cloud layer during part of the day. In addition, shortwave heating decreases exponentially from a maximum at cloud top, which tends to stabilize and evaporate the cloud layer. These results show some of the difficulties in trying to predict the formation, evolution, and dissipation of marine stratocumulus clouds.