Three Rules for the Decrease of Tropical Convection With Global Warming

Abstract

AbstractTropical convection is expected to decrease with warming, in a variety of ways. Specific incarnations of this idea include the “stability‐iris” hypothesis of decreasing anvil cloud coverage, as well as the decrease of both tropospheric and cloud‐base mass fluxes with warming. This paper seeks to encapsulate these phenomena into three “rules,” and to explore their interrelationships and robustness, using both analytical reasoning as well as cloud‐resolving and global climate simulations. We find that each of these rules can be derived analytically from the usual expression for clear‐sky subsidence, so they all embody the same essential physics. But, these rules do not all provide the same degree of constraint: the stability‐iris effect is not entirely robust due to unconstrained microphysical degrees of freedom, and the decrease in cloud‐base mass flux is not entirely robust due to unconstrained effects of entrainment and detrainment. Tropospheric mass fluxes on the other hand are shown to be well‐constrained theoretically, and when evaluated in temperature coordinates they exhibit a monotonic decrease with warming at all vertical levels and across a hierarchy of models.