Identification

Title

Deep convective transition characteristics in the Community Climate System Model and changes under global warming

Abstract

Tropical deep convective transition characteristics, including precipitation pickup, occurrence probability, and distribution tails related to extreme events, are analyzed using uncoupled and coupled versions of the Community Climate System Model (CCSM) under present-day and global warming conditions. Atmospheric Model Intercomparison Project-type simulations using a 0.5° version of the uncoupled model yield good matches to satellite retrievals for convective transition properties analyzed as a function of bulk measures of water vapor and tropospheric temperature. Present-day simulations with the 1.0° coupled model show transition behavior not very different from that seen in the higher-resolution uncoupled version. Frequency of occurrence of column water vapor (CWV) for precipitating points shows reasonable agreement with the retrievals, including the longer-than-Gaussian tails of the distributions. The probability density functions of precipitating grid points collapse toward similar form when normalized by the critical CWV for convective onset in both historical and global warming cases. Under global warming conditions, the following statements can be made regarding the precipitation statistics in the simulation: (i) as the rainfall pickup shifts to higher CWV with warmer temperatures, the critical CWV for the current climate is a good predictor for the same quantity under global warming with the shift given by straightforward conditional instability considerations; (ii) to a first approximation, the probability distributions shift accordingly, except that (iii) frequency of occurrence in the longer-than-Gaussian tail increases considerably, with implications for occurrences of extreme events; and, thus, (iv) precipitation conditional averages on CWV and tropospheric temperature tend to extend to higher values.

Resource type

document

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Unique resource identifier

code

http://n2t.net/ark:/85065/d7tx3gcr

codeSpace

Dataset language

eng

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Classification of spatial data and services

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geoscientificInformation

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title

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reference date

date type

publication

effective date

2016-01-01T00:00:00Z

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publication

effective date

2014-12-15T00:00:00Z

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Copyright 2014 American Meteorological Society (AMS). Permission to use figures, tables, and brief excerpts from this work in scientific and educational works is hereby granted provided that the source is acknowledged. Any use of material in this work that is determined to be "fair use" under Section 107 or that satisfies the conditions specified in Section 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law (17 USC, as revised by P.L. 94-553) does not require the Society's permission. Republication, systematic reproduction, posting in electronic form on servers, or other uses of this material, except as exempted by the above statements, requires written permission or license from the AMS. Additional details are provided in the AMS Copyright Policies, available from the AMS at 617-227-2425 or amspubs@ametsoc.org. Permission to place a copy of this work on this server has been provided by the AMS. The AMS does not guarantee that the copy provided here is an accurate copy of the published work.

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None

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contact position

OpenSky Support

organisation name

UCAR/NCAR - Library

full postal address

PO Box 3000

Boulder

80307-3000

email address

opensky@ucar.edu

web address

http://opensky.ucar.edu/

name: homepage

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pointOfContact

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