The 3-D Tropical Convective Cloud Spectrum in AMIE Radar Observations and Global Climate Simulations

Technical Report · Mon Aug 31 04:00:00 EDT 2015

DOI:https://doi.org/10.2172/1328684· OSTI ID:1328684

Schumacher, Courtney ^[1]

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1. Texas A & M Univ., College Station, TX (United States). Dept. of Atmospheric Sciences; Texas A&M University

During the three years of this grant performance, the PI and her research group have made a number of significant contributions towards determining properties of tropical deep convective clouds and how models depict and respond to the heating associated with tropical convective systems. The PI has also been an active ARM/ASR science team member, including playing a significant role in AMIE and GoAmazon2014/5. She served on the DOE ASR radar science steering committee and was a joint chair of the Mesoscale Convective Organization group under the Cloud Life Cycle working group. This grant has funded a number of graduate students, many of them women, and the PI and her group have presented their DOE-supported work at various universities and national meetings. The PI and her group participated in the AMIE (2011-12) and GoAmazon2014/5 (2014-15) DOE field deployments that occurred in the tropical Indian Ocean and Brazilian Amazon, respectively. AMIE observational results (DePasquale et al. 2014, Feng et al. 2014, Ahmed and Schumacher 2015) focus on the variation and possible importance of Kelvin waves in various phases of the Madden-Julian Oscillation (MJO), on the synergy of the different wavelength radars deployed on Addu Atoll, and on the importance of humidity thresholds in the tropics on stratiform rain production. Much of the PIs GoAmazon2014/5 results to date relate to overviews of the observations made during the field campaign (Martin et al. 2015, 2016; Fuentes et al. 2016), but also include the introduction of the descending arm and its link to ozone transport from the mid-troposphere to the surface (Gerken et al. 2016). Vertical motion and mass flux profiles from GoAmazon (Giangrande et al. 2016) also show interesting patterns between seasons and provide targets for model simulations. Results from TWP-ICE (Schumacher et al. 2015), which took place in Darwin, Australia in 2006 show that vertical velocity retrievals from the profilers provide structure to better quantify the transition between convective, stratiform, and anvil cloud types.

• Research Organization: Texas A & M Univ., College Station, TX (United States)
• Sponsoring Organization: USDOE Office of Science (SC), Biological and Environmental Research (BER) (SC-23)
• DOE Contract Number: SC0008561
• OSTI ID: 1328684
• Report Number(s): DOE-TAMU--0008561
• Country of Publication: United States
• Language: English

Related Subjects

58 GEOSCIENCES