TY - JOUR
T1 - How Tropical Convection Couples High Moist Static Energy Over Land and Ocean
AU - Zhang, Yi
AU - Fueglistaler, Stephan
N1 - Funding Information:
We thank Isaac Held and Nadir Jeevanjee for thoughtful feedback and discussion and Julius Busecke and Allison Hogikyan for suggestions on an earlier version of the manuscript. Y. Z. acknowledges support under award NA18OAR4320123 from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, U.S. Department of Commerce. The statements, findings, conclusions, and recommendations are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, or the U.S. Department of Commerce. S. F. acknowledges support from National Science Foundation Awards AGS-1417659 and AGS-1743753. We acknowledge the European Centre for Medium-range Weather Forecast (ECMWF) for providing ERA-Interim data (https://www.ecmwf.int/en/forecasts/datasets/archive-datasets/reanalysis-datasets/era-interim). We acknowledge the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) for providing Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission (TRMM) 3B42 data (https://disc.gsfc.nasa.gov/datasets/TRMM_3B42RT_Daily_V7/summary). We acknowledge the World Climate Research Programme's Working Group on Coupled Modelling and climate modeling groups (Table S1) for producing CMIP5 model data (https://esgf-node.llnl.gov/projects/cmip5).
Publisher Copyright:
©2020. American Geophysical Union. All Rights Reserved.
PY - 2020/1/28
Y1 - 2020/1/28
N2 - We show that in the tropics, tropical atmospheric dynamics force the subcloud moist static energy (MSE) over land and ocean to be very similar in, and only in, regions of deep convection. Using observed rainfall as a proxy for convection and reanalysis data to calculate MSE, we show that subcloud MSE in the nonconvective regions may differ substantially between land and ocean but is uniform across latitudes in convective regions even on a daily timescale. This result holds also in CMIP5 model simulations of past cold and future warm climates. Furthermore, the distribution of rainfall amount in subcloud MSE is very similar over land and ocean with the peak at 343 J/g and a half width at half maximum of 3 J/g. Our results demonstrate that the horizontally uniform free tropospheric temperature forces the highest subcloud MSE values to be similar over land and ocean.
AB - We show that in the tropics, tropical atmospheric dynamics force the subcloud moist static energy (MSE) over land and ocean to be very similar in, and only in, regions of deep convection. Using observed rainfall as a proxy for convection and reanalysis data to calculate MSE, we show that subcloud MSE in the nonconvective regions may differ substantially between land and ocean but is uniform across latitudes in convective regions even on a daily timescale. This result holds also in CMIP5 model simulations of past cold and future warm climates. Furthermore, the distribution of rainfall amount in subcloud MSE is very similar over land and ocean with the peak at 343 J/g and a half width at half maximum of 3 J/g. Our results demonstrate that the horizontally uniform free tropospheric temperature forces the highest subcloud MSE values to be similar over land and ocean.
KW - convective quasi-equilibrium
KW - land-ocean contrast
KW - moist static energy
KW - tropical convection
KW - weak temperature gradient
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U2 - 10.1029/2019GL086387
DO - 10.1029/2019GL086387
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85079756209
SN - 0094-8276
VL - 47
JO - Geophysical Research Letters
JF - Geophysical Research Letters
IS - 2
M1 - e2019GL086387
ER -