Abstract
Tropical deep convection’s intensity and their anvil productivity are investigated and compared among 8 climatological regions with 4-year collocated and combined CloudSat and CALIPSO data. For all 8 regions, the convective clusters become deeper, while they become wider and tend to be composed of multiple rainy cores. Among 8 regions, convective clusters at the same scale over EP and AT tend to have less but wider rainy cores than those at WP, MA and IO, while those over AF, IO, MA and AM tend to have higher cloud top than those over ocean. For convective clusters less than 300 km wide over AF and MA, the rainy cores pump more ice mass of larger particles to the mid- and upper troposphere in strong updrafts.The total anvil clouds detrained from convection counts for 0.4 to 0.8 of the cluster horizontal scale, 0.2 to 0.6 of the cluster cross section volume, and 0.05 to 0.20 of the cluster ice mass, depending on the cluster scales and height. There are two main detrainment layers. When the convective clusters is less than about 100 km, the anvil clouds are mainly detrained at about 6-8 km with a spreading ratio (ratio of maximum cluster width to convection rainy core width) less than 1.5. When convective clusters becomes 100 km or wider, it reaches the dominate detrainment layer at about 12 km, the detrainment index increase from 2 to more 6. Among 8 regions, convection clusters in MA produce the most anvil volume fraction. The more the ice mass is pumped upward in the anvil clouds till clusters are about 500 km wider. Nevertheless, the anvil ice mass pumped above 15 km is less than 0.1% of the total ice mass in the convective cluster.
Highlights
The tri-modal characteristics of tropical convection (Johnson et al 1999) indicates prominent stable layers that exist over the Pacific warm pool and the tropical eastern Atlantic, which are associated with tri-modal distributions of divergence, cloud detrainment, and fractional cloudiness
Ice cloud microphysical properties are from CloudSat 2C-ICE product, which is a synergetic ice cloud retrieval from combining the Cloud Profiling Radar (CPR) and the Cloud-Aerosol Lidar with Orthogonal Polarization (CALIOP) measurements using a variational method to provide the profiles of extinction coefficient, ice water content (IWC) and effective radius for ice particles (Deng et al, 2010, 2013)
Without counting the stratiform rain, the anvil clouds detrained from convection count for 0.4 to 0.8 of the cluster horizontal fraction, 0.2 to 0.6 of the cluster cross section volume, and 0.05 to 0.20 of the cluster ice mass, depending on the cluster scales
Summary
The tri-modal characteristics of tropical convection (Johnson et al 1999) indicates prominent stable layers that exist over the Pacific warm pool and the tropical eastern Atlantic, which are associated with tri-modal distributions of divergence, cloud detrainment, and fractional cloudiness. From ISCCP C2 climatology, Chou et al (1999), Houze (1989), and Machado and Rossow (1993) showed that high cirrus fraction tends to increase strongly as deep cloud top temperature drops, which is referred as the cirrus-detrainment-temperature (CDT) relation Such a finding stimulated further investigations about climate feedbacks associated with cirrus clouds (Ramanathan et al 1989, 1991; Chou et al 1999; Lindsen et al 2002; Hartmann et al 2002; Stephens 2005). Cirrus clouds at 1416 km tend to be too tenuous to be detected by CloudSat, whose occurrence can be as high as ~60% (Sassen and Wang 2008) The combination of these two active sensors provides the full cross section of deep convection system, which has been used to study the tropical convection evolution during the MJO cycle (Del Genio et al 2012).
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