Formation of Tropical Anvil Clouds by Slow Evaporation
Abstract
Abstract Tropical anvil clouds play a large role in the Earth's radiation balance, but their effect on global warming is uncertain. The conventional paradigm for these clouds attributes their existence to the rapidly declining convective mass flux below the tropopause, which implies a large source of detraining cloudy air there. Here we test this paradigm by manipulating the sources and sinks of cloudy air in cloud‐resolving simulations. We find that anvils form in our simulations because of the long lifetime of upper‐tropospheric cloud condensates, not because of an enhanced source of cloudy air below the tropopause. We further show that cloud lifetimes are long in the cold upper troposphere because the saturation specific humidity is much smaller there than the condensed water loading of cloudy updrafts, which causes evaporative cloud decay to act very slowly. Our results highlight the need for novel cloud‐fraction schemes that align with this decay‐centric framework for anvil clouds.
- Authors:
-
[1];
[3];
[4]
- Univ. of California, Berkeley, CA (United States). Dept. of Earth and Planetary Sciences
- Princeton Univ., NJ (United States). Dept. of Geosciences; Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Lab., Princeton, NJ (United States)
- Lawrence Berkeley National Lab. (LBNL), Berkeley, CA (United States). Climate and Ecosystem Sciences Division
- Univ. of California, Berkeley, CA (United States). Dept. of Earth and Planetary Sciences; Lawrence Berkeley National Lab. (LBNL), Berkeley, CA (United States). Climate and Ecosystem Sciences Division
- Publication Date:
- Research Org.:
- Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL), Berkeley, CA (United States); Univ. of California, Berkeley, CA (United States); Princeton Univ., NJ (United States)
- Sponsoring Org.:
- USDOE Office of Science (SC), Biological and Environmental Research (BER); National Science Foundation (NSF)
- OSTI Identifier:
- 1513798
- Alternate Identifier(s):
- OSTI ID: 1490752
- Grant/Contract Number:
- AC02-05CH11231; DGE1106400; 1535746
- Resource Type:
- Accepted Manuscript
- Journal Name:
- Geophysical Research Letters
- Additional Journal Information:
- Journal Volume: 46; Journal Issue: 1; Journal ID: ISSN 0094-8276
- Publisher:
- American Geophysical Union
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
- Subject:
- 54 ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES; anvil clouds; cloud feedback; cloud decay; detrainment
Citation Formats
Seeley, Jacob T., Jeevanjee, Nadir, Langhans, Wolfgang, and Romps, David M. Formation of Tropical Anvil Clouds by Slow Evaporation. United States: N. p., 2019.
Web. doi:10.1029/2018gl080747.
Seeley, Jacob T., Jeevanjee, Nadir, Langhans, Wolfgang, & Romps, David M. Formation of Tropical Anvil Clouds by Slow Evaporation. United States. https://doi.org/10.1029/2018gl080747
Seeley, Jacob T., Jeevanjee, Nadir, Langhans, Wolfgang, and Romps, David M. Thu .
"Formation of Tropical Anvil Clouds by Slow Evaporation". United States. https://doi.org/10.1029/2018gl080747. https://www.osti.gov/servlets/purl/1513798.
@article{osti_1513798,
title = {Formation of Tropical Anvil Clouds by Slow Evaporation},
author = {Seeley, Jacob T. and Jeevanjee, Nadir and Langhans, Wolfgang and Romps, David M.},
abstractNote = {Abstract Tropical anvil clouds play a large role in the Earth's radiation balance, but their effect on global warming is uncertain. The conventional paradigm for these clouds attributes their existence to the rapidly declining convective mass flux below the tropopause, which implies a large source of detraining cloudy air there. Here we test this paradigm by manipulating the sources and sinks of cloudy air in cloud‐resolving simulations. We find that anvils form in our simulations because of the long lifetime of upper‐tropospheric cloud condensates, not because of an enhanced source of cloudy air below the tropopause. We further show that cloud lifetimes are long in the cold upper troposphere because the saturation specific humidity is much smaller there than the condensed water loading of cloudy updrafts, which causes evaporative cloud decay to act very slowly. Our results highlight the need for novel cloud‐fraction schemes that align with this decay‐centric framework for anvil clouds.},
doi = {10.1029/2018gl080747},
journal = {Geophysical Research Letters},
number = 1,
volume = 46,
place = {United States},
year = {Thu Jan 03 00:00:00 EST 2019},
month = {Thu Jan 03 00:00:00 EST 2019}
}
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