Related papers: How important is tropospheric humidity for coastal…
Rainfall in coastal areas of the tropics is often shaped by the presence of circulations directly associated with the topography, such as land-sea and/or mountain-valley breezes. In many regions the coastally-affected rainfall consitutes…
Coastally associated rainfall is a common feature especially in tropical and subtropical regions. However, it has been difficult to quantify the contribution of coastal rainfall features to the overall local rainfall. We develop a novel…
Recent research has suggested that the overall dependence of convection near coasts on large-scale atmospheric conditions is weaker than over the open ocean or inland areas. This is due to the fact that in coastal regions convection is…
Mesoscale convective systems MCSs play a central role in tropical rainfall and are closely linked to extreme precipitation and large scale variability. However, a quantitative understanding of their environmental controls remains…
Our goal in this study is to characterize the relationship between lower tropospheric environmental humidity and convective mass flux in the tropics. To do so, we have created gridded convective mass flux datasets from five global…
Earth's modern climate is characterized by wet, rainy deep tropics, however paleoclimate and planetary science have revealed a wide range of hydrological cycle regimes connected to different external parameters. Here we investigate how…
Precipitation extremes produced by convection have been found to intensify with near-surface temperatures at a Clausius-Clapeyron rate of $6$ to $7\%$ K$^{-1}$ in simulations of radiative-convective equilibrium (RCE). However, these…
The oceans play a fundamental role in Earth's climate system, redistributing heat and influencing global and regional climate variability and predictability across weather and climate timescales. The benefits of ocean-atmosphere coupling…
Global warming is projected to intensify the hydrological cycle, amplifying risks to ecosystems and society. While extreme rainfall appears to exhibit stronger sensitivity to global warming compared to mean rainfall rates, a unifying…
The influence of forest loss on rainfall remains poorly understood. Addressing this challenge Spracklen et al. recently presented a pan-tropical study of rainfall and land-cover that showed that satellite-derived rainfall measures were…
Convective self-aggregation is a modelling paradigm for thunderstorm organisation over a constant-temperature tropical sea surface. This setup can give rise to cloud clusters over timescales of weeks. In reality, sea surface temperatures do…
Tropical precipitation extremes are expected to strengthen with warming, but quantitative estimates remain uncertain because of a poor understanding of changes in convective dynamics. This uncertainty is addressed here by analyzing…
Understanding future changes in temperature variability and extremes is an important scientific challenge with societal impacts. Here the responses of daily near-surface temperature distributions to climate warming is explored using an…
Tropical regions may experience periodic extreme precipitation and suffer from associated periodic deluges in a warmer climate. Recent studies conducted small-domain (around 100 km x 100 km) atmospheric model simulations and found that…
Intensification of tropical storms measured as the central pressure tendency represents a subtle imbalance, of the order of $10^{-3}$, between the inflow and outflow of air in the storm core. Factors driving this imbalance, especially in…
Cloud-aerosol interactions remain a major obstacle to understanding climate and severe weather. Observations suggest that aerosols enhance tropical thunderstorm activity; past research, motivated by the importance of understanding aerosol…
Tropical monsoons play a critical role in shaping regional and global climate systems, with profound ecological and socio-economic impacts. However, their long-term prediction remains challenging due to the complex interplay of regional…
Soil moisture is a key ingredient of humid heat through supplying moisture and modifying boundary layer properties. Soil moisture heterogeneity due to e.g., antecedent rainfall, can strongly influence weather patterns; yet, its effect on…
Teleconnections between the tropical and the extratropical climates are often considered as a potential source of long-term predictability at seasonal to decadal time scales in the extratropics. This claim is taken up in the present work by…
Rain affects the buoyancy of the upper ocean in two ways: The freshwater flux in rain makes the water fresher and lighter, stabilizing the ocean (a negative buoyancy flux). The convective systems that produce rain are often accompanied by…