Realistic precipitation diurnal cycle in global convection-permitting models by resolving mesoscale convective systems
As a basic mode of climate variability, the diurnal cycle is a key metric that has been used to benchmark climate models. The current state-of-the-art global climate models (GCMs) struggle to accurately represent the precipitation diurnal cycle, frequently peaking too early compared to the observations. Due to the coarse resolution and the use of convection parameterization, GCMs are also unable to simulate organized convective storms, which often exhibit a distinct diurnal cycle. With the emergence of global storm-resolving models at kilometer-scale resolution, this study evaluates the diurnal cycle of precipitation simulated by global storm-resolving models and high-resolution GCMs. We find that at resolutions between ~25-250 km, increasing resolution has limited effects on the precipitation diurnal cycle but global CPMs can reproduce the observed precipitation diurnal cycle much better as they can better represent organized convective storms.