Characterizing deep convective cloud properties and their energetic impacts in satellite observations

Abstract

Because atmospheric deep convection plays an important role in influencing Earth’s global energy budget, it is increasingly important to consider how deep convective cloud and 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 precipitation, anvil cloud development, and their radiative response. The focus of this work, therefore, is to document the relationships between these properties applied to our present-day understanding of how convection fundamentally contributes to the Earth’s energy budget: by 1) vertically transporting energy and mass to the upper troposphere, 2) balancing clear-sky radiative cooling through latent heating, and 3) modulating the top-of-atmospheric radiative energy budget. The processes influencing how convective updraft strength relates to cloud and precipitation development occur on the convective cloud scale and smaller, so it is necessary to document such characteristics on these scales. We begin by providing 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. Over the tropics, these observations support previous insights from a precipitation perspective on where storms are the most intense. Motivated by wanting to understand deep convective contributions to lateral energy transport, we next document how the intensity and frequency of deep convective cores that reach the tropopause (hot towers) relate to anvil cloud and precipitation productivity within the tropics. It is found that the largest amount of mass within the upper troposphere supplied by hot towers is not geographically where the most precipitation and largest anvil extents occur. Motivated by convection’s influence on the top-of-atmospheric radiative energy budget, we analyze how convective core depth and anvil structure influence 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.