The Response of Tropical Rainfall to Idealized Small‐Scale Thermal and Mechanical Forcing
Name
Geophysical Research Letters - 2024 - Velez‐Pardo - The Response of Tropical Rainfall to Idealized Small‐Scale Thermal and.pdf
Description
Published version
Size
786.57 KB
Format
Adobe PDF
Checksum (MD5)
3fe37c5b4801abec54024d2d03ed9f38
Author(s)
Velez‐Pardo, Martin
Cronin, Timothy W
Date Issued
February 24, 2024
Journal
Geophysical Research Letters
Publisher
American Geophysical Union
Citation
Velez-Pardo, M., & Cronin, T. W. (2024). The response of tropical rainfall to idealized small-scale thermal and mechanical forcing. Geophysical Research Letters, 51, e2023GL107231,
Version
Final published version
Abstract
Predicting the spatiotemporal distribution of rainfall remains a key challenge in Tropical Meteorology, partly due to an incomplete understanding of the effects of different environmental factors on atmospheric convection. In this work, we use numerical simulations of tropical ocean domains to study how rainfall responds to imposed localized thermal and mechanical forcings to the atmosphere. We use the Normalized Gross Moist Stability—NGMS—to quantify the net precipitation response associated with a given net atmospheric heating. We find that NGMS values differ considerably for different forcings, but show that the relationship between precipitation and column relative humidity collapses along a universal curve across all of them. We also show that the contributions from mean vertical advection of moist and dry static energy only approximate the NGMS well at scales larger than a couple hundred kilometers, indicating that general horizontal mixing processes are not negligible at smaller scales.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Program in Atmospheres, Oceans, and Climate
Terms of Use
Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives
Persistent DSpace Link
DOI of Published Version
10.1029/2023gl107231
