Regional Variability in the Environmental Controls of Precipitation Regimes in the Tropics

Abstract

AbstractThe environmental factors that control precipitation regimes in Boreal winter rainfall in the tropics and their regional variabilities are examined using a simple statistical analysis and a machine learning (ML) model. Radar‐derived precipitation from field campaigns at Darwin Australia, Manaus Brazil, and the Equatorial Indian Ocean, along with the corresponding large‐scale environmental variables from ERA5 reanalysis, are used. The dependence of marginal distributions of frequencies of these regimes on five environmental variables are calculated. The variables are hourly column integrated precipitable water (PW), convective available potential energy, convective inhibition (CIN), and lower and upper tropospheric wind shear. The simple ML model that predicts the probability of transition from suppressed to an active regime as a function of the environmental variables is designed and optimized for a potential application as a trigger function for convection parameterizations. To the first order the analysis shows an abrupt increase in the probability of an active regime near PW > 60 mm and CIN of <100 J kg−1. The key differences in the frequencies of active regimes among the regions are found to be related to the fact that over Darwin there is strong variability in PW while CIN is generally low. Over Amazon, on the other hand, both PW and CIN are quite variable. Over the Dynamics of the Madden‐Julian Oscillation domain the comparatively frequent low PW is compensated for by consistently low CIN resulting in a moderate frequency of an active regime.