Simulate shallow convection

[bas]

Hello,

 

I want to simulate shallow convection (wet and dry) along the sea-breeze front. I am using WRF 3.5.1 in a nested grid configuration with the highest resolution gird of 500 m while i have turned off cumulus physics so that model should resolve vertical fluxes explicitly. I have two questions;

a) Is this grid resolution i.e. 500 m appropriate to capture shallow convection.
In the WRF physics namelist there are two options for shallow convection, first is "ishallow" which is used with cumulus parametrization and second is "shcu_physics".

I wonder what "shcu_physics" actually does? is it a substitute to cu_physics and what difference it will make compared to the one with explicitly resolved vertical fluxes? I ran two test simulations with and without shcu_physics (cu_physics = 0 in both sims) and did not find any difference. Secondly is it necessary to use this scheme with YSU PBL only? I also used Mellor-Yamada and the model ran fine without any stability issues.

I would appreciate if any of the wrf physics expert could respond on this.

Bas:)