Clouds exert a pivotal control on the mass balance of the Greenland and Antarctic Ice Sheet and therefore their contribution to global sea level. Clouds transport moisture onto the marginal ice sheet, where steep topographic gradients force the air to rise and cool, inducing strong orographic precipitation and leaving the interior ice sheet dry (polar desert). Clouds further regulate the radiation balance at the surface and, consequently, surface melt. Depending on their frequency, phase, and structure, clouds not only mute incoming solar radiation but also enhance longwave radiation at the surface. With the advent of novel observations from space (CloudSat-CALIPSO) and in the field, we now have tools to start evaluating the representation of clouds, precipitation, and ice sheet surface radiation in climate models. Here we evaluate the Community Earth System Model version 1 (CESM1(CAM5)) to represent (1) precipitation frequency and phase, using a CALIPSO cloud simulator; (2) cloud radiative effect comparing to a CloudSat-CALIPSO based product; and (3) snowfall amounts and surface mass balance, comparing to CloudSat, in-situ observations, and regional climate model results. After discussing outstanding cloud biases in CESM1(CAM5), we present our efforts to reduce these in the recently released version 2 (CESM2). We show that clouds are considerably better represented in CESM2, leading to improvements in surface radiation, melt, and surface mass balance, although biases in precipitation phase persist. Our work demonstrates the need for high-quality, long-term observations of clouds and their effect on the ice sheet surface to enable continued climate model improvement.

Space-borne observations reveal that 20–40% of marine convective clouds below the freezing level produce rain. In this paper we speculate what the prevalence of warm rain might imply for convection and large-scale circulations over tropical oceans. We present results using a two-column radiative–convective model of hydrostatic, nonlinear flow on a non-rotating sphere, with parameterized convection and radiation, and review ongoing efforts in high-resolution modeling and observations of warm rain. The model experiments investigate the response of convection and circulation to sea surface temperature (SST) gradients between the columns and to changes in a parameter that controls the conversion of cloud condensate to rain. Convection over the cold ocean collapses to a shallow mode with tops near 850 hPa, but a congestus mode with tops near 600 hPa can develop at small SST differences when warm rain formation is more efficient. Here, interactive radiation and the response of the circulation are crucial: along with congestus a deeper moist layer develops, which leads to less low-level radiative cooling, a smaller buoyancy gradient between the columns, and therefore a weaker circulation and less subsidence over the cold ocean. The congestus mode is accompanied with more surface precipitation in the subsiding column and less surface precipitation in the deep convecting column. For the shallow mode over colder oceans, circulations also weaken with more efficient warm rain formation, but only marginally. Here, more warm rain reduces convective tops and the boundary layer depth—similar to Large-Eddy Simulation (LES) studies—which reduces the integrated buoyancy gradient. Elucidating the impact of warm rain can benefit from large-domain high-resolution simulations and observations. Parameterizations of warm rain may be constrained through collocated cloud and rain profiling from ground, and concurrent changes in convection and rain in subsiding and convecting branches of circulations may be revealed from a collocation of space-borne sensors, including the Global Precipitation Measurement (GPM) and upcoming Aeolus missions.