Abstract
Abstract The mechanisms that regulate moist convection over the warm tropical oceans are not well understood. One school of thought holds that convection is caused by the convergence of moisture, which in turn is produced by an independent dynamical mechanism. Another school maintains that convection occurs as needed to just balance the production of convective instability and that the timescales to establish this balance is much less than the timescales of tropical disturbances. This is called the quasiequilibrium hypothesis. This paper explores how convection is actually governed over the west Pacific warm pool. Convection appears to be initiated there when the boundary-layer equivalent potential temperature exceeds a threshold value that is determined by conditions just above cloud base. Given known surface flux values and the propensity for convection to inject low equivalent potential temperature air into the boundary layer, it is shown that under most circumstances convection is regulated by a balan...
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