Final Technical Report for "Radiative Heating Associated with Tropical Convective Cloud Systems: Its Importance at Meso and Global Scales"

Abstract

Heating associated with tropical cloud systems drive the global circulation. The overall research objectives of this project were to i) further quantify and understand the importance of heating in tropical convective cloud systems with innovative observational techniques, and ii) use global models to determine the large-scale circulation response to variability in tropical heating profiles, including anvil and cirrus cloud radiative forcing. The innovative observational techniques used a diversity of radar systems to create a climatology of vertical velocities associated with the full tropical convective cloud spectrum along with a dissection of the of the total heating profile of tropical cloud systems into separate components (i.e., the latent, radiative, and eddy sensible heating). These properties were used to validate storm-scale and global climate models (GCMs) and were further used to force two different types of GCMs (one with and one without interactive physics). While radiative heating was shown to account for about 20% of the total heating and did not have a strong direct response on the global circulation, the indirect response was important via its impact on convection, esp. in how radiative heating impacts the tilt of heating associated with the Madden-Julian Oscillation (MJO), a phenomenon that accounts for most tropical intraseasonal variability. This work shows strong promise in determining the sensitivity of climate models and climate processes to heating variations associated with cloud systems.