Influence of entrainment on the thermal stratification in simulations of radiative‐convective equilibrium

By Martin S. Singh, P. O’Gorman. 2013

178 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Convective available potential energy (CAPE) is shown to increase rapidly with warming in simulations of radiative‐convective equilibrium over a wide range of surface temperatures. The increase in CAPE implies a systematic deviation of the thermal stratification from moist adiabatic that is non‐negligible at high temperatures. However, cloud buoyancy remains much smaller than what CAPE would imply because entrainment is more effective in reducing buoyancy in warmer atmospheres. An entraining plume model in the limit of zero cloud buoyancy is shown to reproduce the increase in CAPE with warming if the entrainment rate is held fixed and increases in the vertical extent of convection are taken into account. These model results together with radiosonde observations are used to support a conceptual model in which entrainment plays a role in determining the thermal stratification of the tropical atmosphere.

Subfields: Atmospheric Science, Global and Planetary Change

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/64fb18de33e7cf98a7e94236aa651a2e1de720ab

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Citations in the corpus

Could Machine Learning Break the Convection Parameterization Deadlock? (2018, background): “Entrainment also regulates some of the main features of tropical climate [ Singh and O'Gorman , 2013] such as the Inter Tropical Convergence Zone (ITCZ) [ Oueslati and Bellon , 2015], or modes of climate variability [ Bush et al. , 2015] such as El Niño or the Madden Julian Oscillation (MJO) [ Kim…”
Self‐aggregation of convection in long channel geometry (2014, unknown): “Tropospheric warming overall, and the increase in tropospheric warming with TS , are consistent with the finding by Singh and O’Gorman (2013) that the lapse rate in RCE depends on entrainment and free-tropospheric relative humidity.”
Changes in the convective population and thermodynamic environments in convection-permitting regional climate simulations over the United States (2017, background): “Numerous previous studies have suggested that CAPE will increase in a future climate (Trapp et al. 2007, 2009; Muller et al. 2011; Diffenbaugh et al. 2013; Brooks 2013; Igel et al. 2013; Lackmann 2013; Singh and O’Gorman 2013; Gensini and Mote 2014; Trapp and Hoogewind 2016; Romps 2016) and are supp”
An Analytical Model for Tropical Relative Humidity (2014, background): “It has been suggested that the RH profile in the tropics is set primarily by the evaporation of hydrometeors (Sun and Lindzen 1993, hereafter SL93).”