PV-based wave-activity density and its application to tracing heavy precipitation

Abstract

This paper is focused on the tracking of heavy precipitation by detecting strong wave activities in precipitating atmosphere. Based on the generalized moist potential vorticity (GMPV), a new wave-activity density and its wave-activity relation are first derived. The wave-activity density, which is the second-order portion of GMPV and quadratic in disturbance, is then applied to a heavy-rainfall event in North China. It is shown that the wave-activity density contains the vertical shear of wind perturbation, vertical vorticity perturbation and the spatial gradients of latent heating function perturbation associated with the moisture condensation. Due to these important characteristics of precipitating atmosphere, the wave-activity density shows strong anomalies over the precipitation region. The total GMPV and its basic-state and first-order components are also analyzed as comparisons. The result shows that the basic-state GMPV is not capable of diagnosing precipitation, while the total GMPV and the first-order GMPV, although present strong anomalies, are not capable of distinguishing precipitation and non-precipitation areas. This is likely due to the basic state information contained in GMPV and its basic-state and first-order components, which has no direct relation to the precipitation. The spatial distribution of wave-activity density further verifies its capability on detecting and tracing heavy precipitation. Moreover, the statistical result reveals the wave-activity density has a high correlation coefficient with the observational rainfall in a long time series and passes through the significance test.