Protected Convection as a Metric of Dry Air Influence on Precipitation

Abstract

AbstractEntrainment of dry tropospheric air can dilute cloud buoyancies and strongly affect the occurrence and intensity of convection. To measure this dry air influence on tropical precipitation, rainfall values that would occur when convection is “protected” from dry air dilution are estimated. An empirical relationship between tropical oceanic precipitation and entraining buoyancy in the lower troposphere (from the surface to 600 hPa) is leveraged. Protected buoyancies are computed by allowing a plume model to entrain saturated air at environmental temperature. These buoyancies are then used to estimate precipitation from protected convection. In most regions, the protected precipitation greatly exceeds the observed precipitation. Warm waters adjoining continents display striking disparities between observed and protected rainfall pointing to rainfall climatologies severely limited by dry air. The most prominent of these regions include the Red Sea and the Persian Gulf, followed by the Caribbean Sea, the Gulf of Mexico, and the seas surrounding the Maritime Continent. We test if similar large precipitation values are realizable in the Community Atmospheric Model (CAM5), wherein the parameterized convection in small (~2° × 2°) pockets is allowed to only entrain saturated air. The precipitation within these pockets shows strong enhancement that is maintained over time, and is compensated by slight reductions in neighboring regions. In the model, protecting convection yields larger precipitation values over ocean than over land; protected precipitation also intensifies in a uniform SST warming experiment. The model experiments suggest that protected pockets in numerical simulations could be used to mimic the consequences of meteorological protection—from closed circulation or moisture shielding effects—that generate extreme precipitation.