Moist Adiabat Research Articles

Control of Stability and Relative Humidity in the Radiative‐Convective Equilibrium Model Intercomparison Project

AbstractThe Radiative‐Convective Equilibrium Model Intercomparison Project (RCEMIP) exhibits a large spread in the simulated climate across models, including in profiles of buoyancy and relative humidity. Here we use simple theory to understand the control of stability, relative humidity, and their responses to warming. Across the RCEMIP ensemble, temperature profiles are systematically cooler than a moist adiabat, and convective available potential energy (CAPE) increases with warming at a rate greater than that expected from the Clausius‐Clapeyron relation. There is higher CAPE (greater instability) in models that are on average moister in the lower‐troposphere. To more explicitly evaluate the drivers of the intermodel spread, we use simple theory to estimate values of entrainment and precipitation efficiency (PE) given the simulated values of CAPE and lower‐tropospheric relative humidity. We then decompose the intermodel spread in CAPE and relative humidity (and their responses to warming) into contributions from variability in entrainment, PE, the temperature of the convecting top, and the inverse water vapor scale height. Model‐to‐model variation in entrainment is a dominant source of intermodel spread in CAPE and its changes with warming, while variation in PE is the dominant source of intermodel spread in relative humidity. We also decompose the magnitude of the CAPE increase with warming and find that atmospheric warming itself contributes most strongly to the CAPE increase, but the indirect effect of increases in the water vapor scale height with warming also contribute to increasing CAPE beyond that expected from Clausius‐Clapeyron.

Detecting Cold Pool Family Trees in Convection Resolving Simulations

AbstractRecent observations and modeling increasingly reveal the key role of cold pools in organizing the convective cloud field. Several methods for detecting cold pools in simulations exist, but are usually based on buoyancy fields and fall short of reliably identifying the active gust front. The current cold pool (CP) detection and tracking algorithm (CoolDeTA), aims to identify cold pools and follow them in time, thereby distinguishing their active gust fronts and the “offspring” rain cells generated nearby. To accomplish these tasks, CoolDeTA utilizes a combination of thermodynamic and dynamical variables and examines the spatial and temporal relationships between cold pools and rain events. We demonstrate that CoolDeTA can reconstruct CP family trees. Using CoolDeTA we can contrast radiative convective equilibrium (RCE) and diurnal cycle CP dynamics, as well as cases with vertical wind shear and without. We show that the results obtained are consistent with a conceptual model where CP triggering of children rain cells follows a simple birth rate, proportional to a CP's gust front length. The proportionality factor depends on the ambient atmospheric stability and is lower for RCE, in line with marginal stability as traditionally ascribed to the moist adiabat. In the diurnal case, where ambient stability is lower, the birth rate thus becomes substantially higher, in line with periodic insolation forcing—resulting in essentially run‐away mesoscale excitations generated by a single parent rain cell and its CP.

Entrainment rates in the cloud zones of continental shallow cumulus

Entrainment rates from in situ measurements and Large Eddy simulations (LES) of shallow clouds over the Indian peninsula are presented in this study. It is noted that the coherent motions of counter-rotating vortices originate from the updraft zones within clouds, and they subside around shallow clouds. Clouds with stronger updrafts gain depth and have high liquid water content near the cloud top. A three-parameter clustering algorithm (K means) identifies the subregions of the cloud from its core to the surrounding subsiding region. The extreme core region has the highest liquid water content, droplet number concentration, updrafts, and minimum entrainment rates. The varying degree of dilution in the cloud zones is identified here, featuring the dynamics associated with the moist adiabat. Parametric relationships between the entrainment rate and buoyancy in the different cloud zones are illustrated, which could be useful in large-scale models.

How Close Are Leading Tropical Tropospheric Temperature Perturbations to Those under Convective Quasi Equilibrium?

Abstract In convective quasi-equilibrium theory, tropical tropospheric temperature perturbations are expected to follow vertical profiles constrained by convection, referred to as A-profiles here, often approximated by perturbations of moist adiabats. Differences between an idealized A-profile based on moist-static energy conservation and temperature perturbations derived from entraining and nonentraining parcel computations are modest under convective conditions—deep convection mostly occurs when the lower troposphere is close to saturation, thus minimizing the impact of entrainment on tropospheric temperature. Simple calculations with pseudoadiabatic perturbations about the observed profile thus provide useful baseline A-profiles. The first EOF mode of tropospheric temperature (TEOF1) from the ERA-Interim and AIRS retrievals below the level of neutral buoyancy (LNB) is compared with these A-profiles. The TEOF1 profiles with high LNB, typically above 400 hPa, yield high vertical spatial correlation (∼0.9) with A-profiles, indicating that tropospheric temperature perturbations tend to be consistent with the quasi-equilibrium assumption where the environment is favorable to deep convection. Lower correlation tends to occur in regions with low climatological LNB, less favorable to deep convection. Excluding temperature profiles with low LNB significantly increases the tropical mean vertical spatial correlation. The temperature perturbations near LNB exhibit negative deviations from the A-profiles—the convective cold-top phenomenon—with greater deviation for higher LNB. In regions with lower correlation, the deviation from A-profile shows an S-like shape beneath 600 hPa, usually accompanied by a drier lower troposphere. These findings are robust across a wide range of time scales from daily to monthly, although the vertical spatial correlation and TEOF1 explained variance tend to decrease on short time scales.

Seasonally and Regionally Dependent Shifts of the Atmospheric Westerly Jets under Global Warming

Abstract A distinct feature of the atmospheric circulation response to increasing greenhouse gas forcing is the poleward shift of the zonal-mean westerly jet. The dynamical mechanisms of the zonal-mean poleward jet shift have been extensively studied in literature. At seasonal/regional scales, however, the westerly jets can shift equatorward, such as in the early-summer Asia–Pacific region, the late-winter America–Atlantic region, and the winter/spring east Pacific. These equatorward jet shifts imply climate impacts distinct from those of the poleward shifts, yet their causes are not well understood. Here, based on a hierarchy of coupled, prescribed-SST, and aquaplanet simulations, we attribute the seasonal/regional equatorward jet shifts to the enhanced tropical upper-level warming (ETUW), which arises from both the tropical moist adiabat and the enhanced equatorial surface warming. By steepening the meridional temperature gradient in the subtropical upper-to-middle level and assisted by positive eddy feedback, the ETUW increases the zonal wind equatorward of the climatological jet. When the regional/seasonal meridional temperature gradients (or equivalently the westerly jets) are weak and peak close to the tropics, the ETUW effect overcomes the poleward jet-shift mechanisms and leads to the equatorward jet shifts. This climatological-state dependency is consistently seen in the decomposed jet responses to uniform warming and surface warming pattern, and further demonstrated through idealized aquaplanet experiments with designed climatological states. For uniform warming, the ETUW arising from moist adiabat makes the general poleward jet shifts insignificant in the aforementioned favorable regions/seasons. For warming pattern, the ETUW from enhanced equatorial warming drives substantial equatorward jet shifts in these favorable seasons/regions.

Quantifying Energy Balance Regimes in the Modern Climate, Their Link to Lapse Rate Regimes, and Their Response to Warming

Abstract Energy balance and lapse rate regimes qualitatively characterize the low, middle, and high latitudes of Earth’s modern climate. Currently we do not have a complete quantitative understanding of the spatiotemporal structure of energy balance regimes [e.g., radiative convective equilibrium (RCE) and radiative advective equilibrium (RAE)] and their connection to lapse rate regimes (moist adiabat and surface inversion). Here we use the vertically integrated moist static energy budget to define a nondimensional number that quantifies where and when RCE and RAE are approximately satisfied in Earth’s modern climate. We find RCE exists year-round in the tropics and in the northern midlatitudes during summertime. RAE exists year-round over Antarctica and in the Arctic with the exception of early summer. We show that lapse rates in RCE and RAE are consistent with moist adiabatic and surface inversion lapse rates, respectively. We use idealized models (energy balance and aquaplanet) to test the following hypotheses: 1) RCE occurs during midlatitude summer for land-like (small heat capacity) surface conditions, and 2) sea ice is necessary for the existence of annual-mean RAE over a polar ocean, such as the Arctic. Consistent with point 1, an aquaplanet configured with a shallow mixed layer transitions to RCE in the midlatitudes during summertime whereas it does not for a deep mixed layer. Furthermore, we confirm point 2 using mechanism-denial aquaplanet experiments with and without thermodynamic sea ice. Finally, we show energy balance regimes of the modern climate provide a useful guide to the vertical structure of the warming response in the annual mean, and seasonally over the tropics and the southern high latitudes.

Should Reversible Convective Inhibition be Used when Determining the Inflow Layer of a Convective Storm?

AbstractConvective inhibition (CIN) is one of the parameters used by forecasters to determine the inflow layer of a convective storm, but little work has examined the best way to compute CIN. One decision that must be made is whether to lift parcels following a pseudoadiabat (removing hydrometeors as the parcel ascends) or reversible moist adiabat (retaining hydrometeors). To determine which option is best, idealized simulations of ordinary convection are examined using a variety of base states with different reversible CIN values for parcels originating in the lowest 500 m. Parcel trajectories suggest that ascent over the lowest few kilometers, where CIN is typically accumulated, is best conceptualized as a reversible moist adiabatic process instead of a pseudoadiabatic process. Most inflow layers do not contain parcels with substantial reversible CIN, despite these parcels possessing ample convective available potential energy and minimal pseudoadiabatic CIN. If a stronger initiation method is used, or hydrometeor loading is ignored, simulations can ingest more parcels with large amounts of reversible CIN. These results suggest that reversible CIN, not pseudoadiabatic CIN, is the physically relevant way to compute CIN and that forecasters may benefit from examining reversible CIN instead of pseudoadiabatic CIN when determining the inflow layer.

Variations of Tropical Lapse Rates in Climate Models and their Implications for Upper Tropospheric Warming

AbstractThe vertical temperature structure in the tropics is primarily set by convection and therefore follows a moist adiabat to first order. However, tropical upper tropospheric temperatures differ among climate models and observations, as atmospheric convection remains poorly understood. Here, we quantify the variations in tropical lapse rates in CMIP6 models and explore reasons for these variations. We find that differences in surface temperatures weighted by the regions of strongest convection cannot explain these variations and therefore we hypothesise that the representation of convection itself and associated small scale processes are responsible. We reproduce these variations in perturbed physics experiments with the global atmospheric model ICON-A, in which we vary autoconversion and entrainment parameters. For smaller autoconversion values, additional freezing enthalpy from the cloud water that is not precipitated warms the upper troposphere. Smaller entrainment rates also lead to a warmer upper troposphere, as convection and thus latent heating reaches higher. Furthermore, we show that according to most radiosonde datasets all CMIP6 AMIP simulations overestimate recent upper tropospheric warming. Additionally, all radiosonde datasets agree that climate models on average overestimate the amount of upper tropospheric warming for a given lower tropospheric warming. We demonstrate that increased entrainment rates reduce this overestimation, likely because of the reduction of latent heat release in the upper troposphere. Our results suggest that imperfect convection parameterisations are responsible for a considerable part of the variations in tropical lapse rates and also part of the overestimation of warming compared to the observations.

A single column simulation-based decomposition of the tropical upper tropospheric warming

AbstractAn atmospheric global climate model (GCM) and its associated single-column model are used to study the tropical upper tropospheric warming and elucidate how different processes drive this warming. In this modeling framework, on average the direct radiative process accounts for 13% of the total warming. The radiation increases the atmospheric lapse rate and triggers more convection, which further produces 74% of the total warming. The rest 13% is attributable to the circulation adjustment. The relative importance of these processes differs in different regions. In the deep tropics, the radiative-convective adjustment produces the most significant warming and accounts for almost 100% of the total warming. In the subtropics, the radiative-convective adjustment accounts for 73% of the total warming and the circulation adjustment plays a more important role than in the deep tropics, especially at the levels above 200 hPa. When the lateral boundary conditions, i.e. the temperature and water vapor advections, are held fixed in single-column simulations, the tropospheric relative humidity significantly increases in the radiative-convective adjustment in response to the surface warming. This result, in contrast to the relative humidity conservation behavior in the GCM, highlights the importance of circulation adjustment in maintaining the constant relative humidity. The tropical upper tropospheric warming in both the full GCM and the single-column simulations is found to be less strong than the warming predicted by reference moist adiabats. This evidences that the sub-moist-adiabat warming occurs even without the dilution effect of the large-scale circulation adjustment.

Weak cooling of the troposphere by tropical islands in simulations of the radiative‐convective equilibrium

AbstractWe assess whether tropical islands tend to warm or cool the troposphere. To this end, we use idealized simulations of the radiative‐convective equilibrium employing a simulation domain that contains flat tropical islands represented by a land surface scheme. Results show more frequent precipitation over land as coastal breezes establish, and gravity waves triggered by afternoon convection propagating away from the islands. These waves horizontally homogenize density and in doing so communicate convectively induced temperature anomalies from the islands onto the ocean. What is the influence of the islands on tropospheric temperature? The diurnal surface warming of the islands tends to push the afternoon convection over land towards a warmer moist adiabat and, along with it, the temperature profile of the troposphere. However, at the same time, drying of the land surface pulls it towards a colder moist adiabat. All in all, we find that islands cool rather than warm the troposphere. More specifically, we obtain a weakly colder domain‐mean troposphere during episodes with a larger share of precipitation over land, or when the prescribed land fraction is increased. In particular, we find that the cooling becomes more pronounced over large islands. Overall, the results indicate that the inability of evaporation to keep up with the daytime surface warming over land, in contrast to the ocean, is of key relevance for understanding land effects on the mean climate.

Shallow cumulus cloud feedback in large eddy simulations – bridging the gap to storm-resolving models

Abstract. The response of shallow trade cumulus clouds to global warming is a leading source of uncertainty in projections of the Earth's changing climate. A setup based on the Rain In Cumulus over the Ocean field campaign is used to simulate a shallow trade wind cumulus field with the Icosahedral Nonhydrostatic Large Eddy Model in a control and a perturbed 4 K warmer climate, while degrading horizontal resolution from 100 m to 5 km. As the resolution is coarsened, the base-state cloud fraction increases substantially, especially near cloud base, lateral mixing is weaker, and cloud tops reach higher. Nevertheless, the overall vertical structure of the cloud layer is surprisingly robust across resolutions. In a warmer climate, cloud cover reduces, alone constituting a positive shortwave cloud feedback: the strength correlates with the amount of base-state cloud fraction and thus is stronger at coarser resolutions. Cloud thickening, resulting from more water vapour availability for condensation in a warmer climate, acts as a compensating feedback, but unlike the cloud cover reduction it is largely resolution independent. Therefore, refining the resolution leads to convergence to a near-zero shallow cumulus feedback. This dependence holds in experiments with enhanced realism including precipitation processes or warming along a moist adiabat instead of uniform warming. Insofar as these findings carry over to other models, they suggest that storm-resolving models may exaggerate the trade wind cumulus cloud feedback.

Quantifying Key Mechanisms That Contribute to the Deviation of the Tropical Warming Profile From a Moist Adiabat

AbstractClimate models project tropical warming is amplified aloft relative to the surface in response to increased CO2. Here we show moist adiabatic adjustment overpredicts the multimodel mean 300 hPa temperature response by 16.6–25.3% across the CMIP5 model hierarchy. We show three mechanisms influence overprediction: climatological large‐scale circulation, direct effect of increased CO2, and convective entrainment. Accounting for the presence of a climatological large‐scale circulation and the direct effect of CO2 reduces the CMIP5 multimodel mean overprediction by 0.7–7.2% and 2.8–3.9%, respectively, but does not eliminate it. To quantify the influence of entrainment, we vary the Tokioka parameter in aquaplanet simulations. When entrainment is decreased by decreasing the Tokioka parameter from 0.1 to 0, overprediction decreases by 9.6% and 10.4% with and without a large‐scale circulation, respectively. The sensitivity of overprediction to climatological entrainment rate in the aquaplanet mostly follows the predictions of zero‐buoyancy bulk‐plume and spectral‐plume models.

Sensitivity of the Atmospheric Water Cycle within the Habitable Zone of a Tidally Locked, Earth-like Exoplanet

Abstract Synchronously orbiting, tidally locked exoplanets with a dayside facing their star and a permanently dark nightside orbiting dim stars are prime candidates for habitability. Simulations of these planets often show the potential to maintain an Earth-like climate with a complete hydrological cycle. Here we examine the sensitivity of the atmospheric water cycle to changes in stellar flux and describe the main underlying mechanisms. In a slowly rotating, tidally locked Earth-like atmospheric model, the response to a small (about 10%) increase in stellar irradiance from a habitable zone control simulation is examined. The water cycle is enhanced in response to the increased stellar irradiance. While the evaporation increase behaves similarly to the stellar radiation increase, the day-to-night energy transport by the mean circulation is critical to the planet's precipitation changes. Increased efficiency of the energy transport in a warmer climate shapes the substellar precipitation increase. On the nightside, precipitation changes are weak as a result of the large cancellation between the increased energy transport and the increased longwave emission. The day-to-night energy transport efficiency is sensitive to the variation of the atmosphere's vertical stratification. Due to weak temperature gradients in the upper troposphere and a moist adiabat maintained in the substellar region, variations in the substellar surface temperature and specific humidity govern the increase of the planet’s stratification with warming. This suggests a scaling of the nightside’s precipitation based on the substellar surface thermodynamic changes, a sensitivity that holds over a wider range of stellar irradiance changes.

The Moist Adiabat, Key of the Climate Response to Anthropogenic Forcing

A straightforward mechanism based on properties of the moist adiabat is proposed to construe the observed latitudinal and longitudinal distribution of the anthropogenic forcing efficiency. Considering precipitation patterns at the planetary scale, idealized environmental adiabats leading to low-pressure systems are deduced. When the climate system responds to a small perturbation, which reflects radiative forcing that follows increasing anthropogenic emissions, the dry and moist adiabatic lapse rates move away from each other as the temperature of the moist adiabat at the altitude z = 0 increases. When the atmosphere becomes unstable, under the influence of the perturbation, a positive feedback loop occurs because of a transient change in the emission level height of outgoing longwave radiation in the saturated absorption bands of water vapor. During these periods of instability, the perturbation of the climate system is exerted with the concomitant warming of the surface temperature. In contrast, the return of the surface temperature to its initial value before the development of the cyclonic system is very slow because heat exchanges are mainly ruled by latent and sensible heat fluxes. Consequently, the mean surface temperature turns out to result from successive events with asymmetrical surface–atmosphere heat exchanges. The forcing efficiency differs according to whether atmospheric instability has a continental or oceanic origin. Hence the rendition of the latitudinal and longitudinal distribution of the observed surface temperature response to anthropogenic forcing, which specifies in detail the mechanisms involved in the various climate systems, including the Arctic amplification.

Climatology Explains Intermodel Spread in Tropical Upper Tropospheric Cloud and Relative Humidity Response to Greenhouse Warming

AbstractThe response of upper tropospheric clouds and relative humidity (RH) to warming is important to the overall sensitivity of the Earth to increasing greenhouse gas concentrations. Previous research has shown that changes in hydrologic fields should closely track rising isotherms in a warming climate. Here we show that the distribution of tropical clouds and RH in general circulation models is approximately constant under greenhouse warming when using temperature as a vertical coordinate. By assuming that these fields are an invariant function of atmospheric temperature and that temperature change follows a dilute moist adiabat, we are able to accurately predict cloud fraction and RH changes in the tropical upper troposphere (150–400 hPa) in 27 general circulation models. Our results indicate that intermodel spread in changes of tropical upper tropospheric clouds and RH is closely related to differences in model climatology and could be substantially reduced if model ensembles reliably reproduced observed climatologies.

A 1D RCE Study of Factors Affecting the Tropical Tropopause Layer and Surface Climate

Abstract There are discrepancies between global climate models regarding the evolution of the tropical tropopause layer (TTL) and also whether changes in ozone impact the surface under climate change. We use a 1D clear-sky radiative–convective equilibrium model to determine how a variety of factors can affect the TTL and how they influence surface climate. We develop a new method of convective adjustment, which relaxes the temperature profile toward the moist adiabat and allows for cooling above the level of neutral buoyancy. The TTL temperatures in our model are sensitive to CO2 concentration, ozone profile, the method of convective adjustment, and the upwelling velocity, which is used to calculate a dynamical cooling rate in the stratosphere. Moreover, the temperature response of the TTL to changes in each of the above factors sometimes depends on the others. The surface temperature response to changes in ozone and upwelling at and above the TTL is also strongly amplified by both stratospheric and tropospheric water vapor changes. With all these influencing factors, it is not surprising that global models disagree with regard to TTL structure and evolution and the influence of ozone changes on surface temperatures. On the other hand, the effect of doubling CO2 on the surface, including just radiative, water vapor, and lapse-rate feedbacks, is relatively robust to changes in convection, upwelling, or the applied ozone profile.

A Conceptual Spectral Plume Model for Understanding Tropical Temperature Profile and Convective Updraft Velocities

Abstract The tropical tropospheric temperature is close to but typically cooler than that of the moist adiabat. The negative temperature deviation from the moist adiabat manifests a C-shape profile and is projected to increase and stretch upward under warming in both comprehensive climate models and idealized radiative–convective equilibrium (RCE) simulations. The increased temperature deviation corresponds to a larger convective available potential energy (CAPE) under warming. The extreme convective updraft velocity in RCE increases correspondingly but at a smaller fractional rate than that of CAPE. A conceptual model for the tropical temperature deviation and convective updraft velocities is formulated to understand these features. The model builds on the previous zero-buoyancy model but replaces the bulk zero-buoyancy plume by a spectrum of entraining plumes that have distinct entrainment rates and are positively buoyant until their levels of neutral buoyancy. Besides the negative temperature deviation and its increasing magnitude with warming, this allows the spectral plume model to further predict the C-shape profile as well as its upward stretch with warming. By representing extreme convective updrafts as weakly entraining plumes, the model is able to reproduce the smaller fractional increase in convective velocities with warming as compared to that of CAPE. The smaller fractional increase is mainly caused by the upward stretch in the temperature deviation profile with warming, which reduces the ratio between the integrated plume buoyancy and CAPE. The model thus provides a useful tool for understanding the tropical temperature profile and convective updraft velocities.

Similarity Among Atmospheric Thermal Stratifications Over Elevated Surfaces Under Radiative‐Convective Equilibrium

AbstractAn air column under radiative‐convective equilibrium is studied here to understand equilibrium climate over different surface elevations. Cloud‐resolving model (CRM) simulations show that atmospheric thermal stratifications exhibit similar structures when expressed in sigma coordinates over varying surface elevations under radiative‐convective equilibrium. A zero‐buoyancy plume model that reproduces CRM results is used to interpret related processes. As surface pressure decreases, decreased pressure on a certain σ level leads to decreases of moist adiabatic temperature lapse rate, which largely cancel the increases of moist adiabatic lapse rate by temperature decreases. Meanwhile, the invariance of convective entrainment/detrainment rates keeps the deviation of environmental temperature lapse rate from moist adiabat approximately invariant, result in similar thermal stratifications under varying surface pressures. A comparison of thermodynamic profiles over the Tibetan Plateau with those over plains in reanalysis confirms the similarity found in CRM simulations. This similarity provides a useful simplification for representing the effects of convection.

A Simple Model of a Balanced Boundary Layer Coupled to a Large-Scale Convective Circulation

Abstract Many simple models of large-scale tropical circulations do not include a frictional boundary layer. A simple model is presented where the convective circulation is coupled to the boundary layer convergence. In the free troposphere, convection and boundary layer heating try to relax to a moist adiabat from the local sea surface temperature with a time scale τc, but other processes act to maintain a weak temperature gradient. There is a mass balance between radiatively driven subsidence and the large-scale convective mass flux. For a prescribed Gaussian surface temperature, the model predicts a mass flux that varies as and a convective width proportional to its reciprocal. In the boundary layer, there can be significant horizontal temperature gradients and a balance between the pressure gradient and drag is assumed. Coupling between the two layers is mediated by the vertical velocity at the top of the boundary layer. The boundary layer constrains the circulation in three ways. First, it may lengthen the relaxation time scale compared to deep convection. Second, the evaporation in the nonconvecting region constrains the horizontal moisture advection. Third, it maintains a convective boundary layer where there is a convective mass flux; this condition cannot be satisfied if τc is too small or if the drag is too large, thus showing that such values are physically impossible. These results provide testable hypotheses concerning the physics and large-scale dynamics in weather and climate models.

The Role of Latent Heat Flux in Tropical Cyclogenesis over the Western North Pacific: Comparison of Developing versus Non-Developing Disturbances

The possible role of air–sea latent heat flux (LHF) in tropical cyclone (TC) genesis over the western North Pacific (WNP) is investigated using state-of-the-art satellite and analysis datasets. The authors conducted composite analyses of several meteorological variables after identifying developing and non-developing tropical disturbances from June to October of the period 2000 to 2009. Compared to the non-developing disturbances, increased LHF underlying the developing disturbances enhances boundary–layer specific humidity. The secondary circulation then transports more boundary–layer moisture inward and upward and, thus, induces a stronger moist core in the middle troposphere. Accordingly, the air in the core region ascends following a warmer moist adiabat than that in the environment and results in a stronger upper-level warm core, which is associated with a stronger near-surface tangential wind based on the thermal wind balance. This enlarges the magnitude and negative radial gradient of LHF and, thereby, further increases boundary–layer specific humidity. A tropical depression forms when the near-surface tangential wind increases to a certain extent as a result of the continuing positive feedback between near-surface wind and LHF. The results suggest an important role of wind-driven LHF in TC genesis over the WNP.