GISS Lunch Seminar
Speaker: Juliet Pilewskie (NASA/GISS/Columbia)
Topic: The cloud radiative effects of tropical deep convection from an A-Train perspective
Because atmospheric deep convection plays an important role in influencing Earth's global energy budget, it is increasingly important to consider how deep convective clouds and their energetic properties might change due to a changing climate. Deep convective vertical intensity may increase in regions that are becoming increasingly moist in response to warming sea surface temperatures, which could alter anvil cloud development and their radiative effects. The focus of this work, therefore, is to document the relationships between these properties and apply them to our present-day understanding of how convection fundamentally contributes to the Earth's radiative energy budget. We create a near-global perspective of convection using a database of "convective objects" generated from ten years of A-Train measurements. By leveraging CloudSat's ability to distinguish convective cores, we define a proxy for a convective core vertical intensity based on the height of the attenuating radar signal. In relating convective core depth and anvil structure to their cloud radiative effects, we find that the most vertically intense systems more often contribute a warming at the top of the atmosphere compared to weaker systems, which holds across different regions in the tropics. Finally, we explore how these relationships are sensitive to large-scale environmental conditions to provide benchmark relationships for modeling studies assessing high cloud feedbacks in a changing climate.
16 июл 2024
