Identification

Title

Effects of convective adjustment time scale on the simulation of tropical climate

Abstract

This paper describes the effects of convective adjustment time scale (τ) on the simulation of tropical climate. The NCAR-Community Atmosphere Model version 3 (CAM3) has been used for this study. In the default configuration of the model, the prescribed value of τ, a characteristic time scale with which convective available potential energy (CAPE) is removed at an exponential rate by convection, is assumed to be 1 h. However, some recent observational findings suggest that, it is larger by around one order of magnitude. In order to investigate the dependence of tropical climate simulation to this time scale, we conducted two simulations, one with a time scale of 1 h (CTRL) and another with 8 h (EXPT), and examined the differences in simulated climate. For this, we analyzed both the mean as well as transient features, viz., seasonal mean quantities, equatorial waves, and meridional migration of convective disturbances. The spatial distributions of seasonal mean precipitation are found to be better in EXPT. The spatial correlation coefficients of CTRL and EXPT with the observations are 0.79 and 0.83, respectively, for northern hemisphere winter. Similarly, for northern hemisphere summer, the values are 0.67 and 0.79, respectively. In addition, there is also an improvement in the simulation of equatorial waves, specifically, the Kelvin waves, Madden-Julian oscillation, and n=1 equatorial Rossby waves become more realistic in EXPT. The characteristics of meridional migration of convective activity over tropics also become more reasonable in EXPT. Thus, it is found that there is a clear improvement in some of the key aspects of the simulated tropical climate with the revised convective adjustment time scale.

Resource type

document

Resource locator

Unique resource identifier

code

https://n2t.org/ark:/85065/d7t43vpd

codeSpace

Dataset language

eng

Spatial reference system

code identifying the spatial reference system

Classification of spatial data and services

Topic category

geoscientificInformation

Keywords

Keyword set

keyword value

Text

originating controlled vocabulary

title

Resource Type

reference date

date type

publication

effective date

2016-01-01T00:00:00Z

Geographic location

West bounding longitude

East bounding longitude

North bounding latitude

South bounding latitude

Temporal reference

Temporal extent

Begin position

End position

Dataset reference date

date type

publication

effective date

2012-01-01T00:00:00Z

Frequency of update

Quality and validity

Lineage

Conformity

Data format

name of format

version of format

Constraints related to access and use

Constraint set

Use constraints

Limitations on public access

None

Responsible organisations

Responsible party

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

responsible party role

pointOfContact

Metadata on metadata

Metadata point of contact