TY - JOUR
T1 - Precipitation-Moisture Coupling Over Tropical Oceans
T2 - Sequential Roles of Shallow, Deep, and Mesoscale Convective Systems
AU - Chen, Xingchao
AU - Leung, L. Ruby
AU - Feng, Zhe
AU - Yang, Qiu
N1 - Funding Information:
We thank Dr. Brandon Wolding and an anonymous reviewer for their valuable comments that helped improve the manuscript. The authors are supported by the Office of Science of the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Biological and Environmental Research as part of the Regional and Global Model Analysis program area. Pacific Northwest National Laboratory is operated for DOE by Battelle Memorial Institute under contract DE‐AC05‐76RL01830. The cloud tracking and data analyses were mainly carried out using the computing resources at the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC), a U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science User Facility located at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, operated under Contract No. DE‐AC02‐05CH11231.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2022. American Geophysical Union. All Rights Reserved.
PY - 2022/4/16
Y1 - 2022/4/16
N2 - Precipitation over tropical oceans rapidly increases when the environmental column saturation fraction (CSF) increases past a critical value of ∼0.7. Past studies suggested that increased stratiform rainfall greatly contributes to the rapid rainfall enhancement. In this study, the sequential roles of non-deep convection, deep convection, and mesoscale convective system (MCS) in precipitation-moisture interactions are examined using 19 years of satellite observations. When CSF is below ∼0.5, non-deep convection dominates total rainfall, and predominantly contributes to moistening of the environment. Between the CSF range of 0.5–0.7, transition to deep convective rainfall begins. Meanwhile, MCS contribution to total rain rapidly increases, and the environment is further moistened. MCS becomes the major rainfall type above the critical CSF value (∼0.7), with the rapid increase of total rain mostly explained by the rapid increase in MCS rain area. Rainfall reduction at high CSF values is jointly contributed by MCS and non-deep convection.
AB - Precipitation over tropical oceans rapidly increases when the environmental column saturation fraction (CSF) increases past a critical value of ∼0.7. Past studies suggested that increased stratiform rainfall greatly contributes to the rapid rainfall enhancement. In this study, the sequential roles of non-deep convection, deep convection, and mesoscale convective system (MCS) in precipitation-moisture interactions are examined using 19 years of satellite observations. When CSF is below ∼0.5, non-deep convection dominates total rainfall, and predominantly contributes to moistening of the environment. Between the CSF range of 0.5–0.7, transition to deep convective rainfall begins. Meanwhile, MCS contribution to total rain rapidly increases, and the environment is further moistened. MCS becomes the major rainfall type above the critical CSF value (∼0.7), with the rapid increase of total rain mostly explained by the rapid increase in MCS rain area. Rainfall reduction at high CSF values is jointly contributed by MCS and non-deep convection.
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U2 - 10.1029/2022GL097836
DO - 10.1029/2022GL097836
M3 - Letter
AN - SCOPUS:85128359705
SN - 0094-8276
VL - 49
JO - Geophysical Research Letters
JF - Geophysical Research Letters
IS - 7
M1 - e2022GL097836
ER -