Influences of subsidence and free-tropospheric conditions on the nocturnal growth of nonclassical marine stratocumulus

An obvious role of subsidence is to push the inversion layer down nearly identically and at the same rate under different ambient conditions. Enhanced subsidence, as expected, diminishes the entrainment rate, cloud-top height, cloud thickness, and LWP. However, it has a small influence on the inversion thickness and the dynamic instability across the inversion.

An LWP budget analysis shows that the direct effect of subsidence is a small reduction in the LWP, but the indirect effect of subsidence is large due to contributions from other physical processes. Therefore, subsidence is an important physical process controlling the LWP budget, even though its direct contribution is significantly smaller than the largest contributions from both radiation and entrainment.