Despite its central and critical role within the climate system, precipitation is a notoriously difficult quantity to simulate correctly in models, and especially so at high Southern latitudes. This is due to limits and uncertainties in our observations (satellite and ground-based) and gaps in our understanding of unique microphysical processes at these latitudes. These limit the ability of climate simulations to project future changes in precipitation and for weather forecast models to predict precipitation events well.

We will show the role that our recent research has in starting to resolve these issues. We will demonstrate that the separation of airmasses between oceanic and Antarctic-origin is necessary to understand aerosol quantity and type, and that this leads directly to cloud and precipitation formation. Microscopic oceanic biology emits gases that ultimately influence large-scale cloud properties and precipitation close to the Antarctic continent. By improving the simulation of Antarctic cloud properties in high-resolution regional models, we demonstrate that the simulation of more realistic precipitation is possible to achieve. We will discuss results of improvements to cloud and precipitation from the ACCESS family of models. Turbulent processes within clouds can be related directly to the amount of liquid water present in the environment. This provides a pathway for future improvement of precipitation microphysics within climate and NWP simulations.