Previous work has found that as the surface warms the large‐scale tropical circulations weaken, convective anvil cloud fraction decreases, and atmospheric static stability increases. Circulation changes inevitably lead to changes in the humidity and cloud fields which influence the surface energetics. The exchange of mass between the boundary layer (BL) and the midtroposphere has also been shown to weaken in global climate models. What has remained less clear is how robust these changes in the circulation are to different representations of convection, clouds, and microphysics in numerical models. We use simulations from the Radiative‐Convective Equilibrium Model Intercomparison Project to investigate the interaction between overturning circulations, surface temperature, and atmospheric moisture. We analyze the underlying mechanisms of these relationships using a 21‐member model ensemble that includes both General Circulation Models and Cloud‐system Resolving Models. We find a large spread in the change of intensity of the overturning circulation. Both the range of the circulation intensity, and its change with warming can be explained by the range of the mean upward vertical velocity. There is also a consistent decrease in the exchange of mass between the BL and the midtroposphere. However, the magnitude of the decrease varies substantially due to the range of responses in both mean precipitation and mean precipitable water. We hypothesize based on these results that despite well understood thermodynamic constraints, there is still a considerable ability for the cloud fields and the precipitation efficiency to drive a substantial range of tropical convective responses to warming.
Tropical convection that occurs on large-enough space and time scales may evolve in response to large-scale balanced circulations. In this scenario, large-scale midtropospheric vorticity anomalies modify the atmospheric stability by virtue of thermal wind gradient balance. The convective vertical mass flux and the moisture profile adjust to changes in atmospheric stability that affect moisture and entropy transport. We hypothesize that the convection observed during the 2011 DYNAMO field campaign evolves in response to balanced dynamics. Strong relationships between midtropospheric vorticity and atmospheric stability confirm the relationship between the dynamic and the thermodynamic environments, while robust relationships between the atmospheric stability, the vertical mass flux, and the saturation fraction provide evidence of moisture adjustment. These results are important because the part of convection that occurs as a response to balanced dynamics is potentially predictable. Furthermore, the diagnostics used in this work provide a simple framework for model evaluation, and suggest that one way to improve simulations of large-scale organized deep tropical convection in global models is to adequately capture the relationship between the dynamic and thermodynamic environments in convective parameterizations.
more » « less- NSF-PAR ID:
- 10110804
- Publisher / Repository:
- American Meteorological Society
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Journal of the Atmospheric Sciences
- Volume:
- 76
- Issue:
- 9
- ISSN:
- 0022-4928
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- p. 2781-2799
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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