The Mechanics of Gross Moist Stability

By D. Raymond, S. Sessions, A. Sobel, Ž. Fuchs. 2009

297 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The gross moist stability relates the net lateral outflow of moist entropy or moist static energy from an atmospheric convective region to some measure of the strength of the convection in that region. If the gross moist stability can be predicted as a function of the local environmental conditions, then it becomes the key element in understanding how convection is controlled by the large‐scale flow. This paper provides a guide to the various ways in which the gross moist stability is defined and the subtleties of its calculation from observations and models. Various theories for the determination of the gross moist stability are presented and its roles in current conceptual models for the tropical atmospheric circulation are analyzed. The possible effect of negative gross moist stability on the development and dynamics of tropical disturbances is currently of great interest.

Subfields: Atmospheric Science, Global and Planetary Change

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/b5f23a3e103a5b7f3f3aedfce4315f9d96726cfd

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Atmospheric Science

1. E. Maloney
2. A. Sobel
3. Daehyun Kim
4. D. Frierson
5. Yonghua Chen
6. G. Bellon
7. M. Yao
8. B. Möbis

In Global and Planetary Change

1. E. Maloney
2. A. Sobel
3. Daehyun Kim
4. D. Frierson
5. G. Bellon
6. Yonghua Chen
7. M. Yao
8. B. Möbis

Citations in the corpus

• Surface Fluxes and Tropical Intraseasonal Variability: a Reassessment (2008, background): “Raymond et al. (2009) review recent thinking on the mechanincs of the GMS.”
• An Idealized Semi-Empirical Framework for Modeling the Madden–Julian Oscillation (2012, background): “Negative gross moist stability has also been proposed as an important contributor to the moist static energy budget of the MJO (Raymond and Fuchs 2009; Raymond et al. 2009).”
• CORRIGENDUM of the MJO Transition from Shallow to Deep Convection in Cloudsat-Calipso Data and GISS GCM Simulations (2012, methodology): “Simple dynamical models that utilize an assumed interaction between tropospheric moisture and precipitation or the diabatic heating profile have had success producing MJO-like behavior (e.g., Khouider and Majda 2006; Kuang 2008; Raymond et al. 2009).”
• The MJO as a Dispersive, Convectively Coupled Moisture Wave: Theory and Observations (2016, unknown): “The normalized gross moist stability is denoted by ~ M [Neelin and Held (1987); see also Raymond et al. (2009) for a review on gross moist stability], defined as where M s and M q are the mean gross dry stability and the gross moisture stratification, respectively, defined as where S 5 C p T 1 f is…”
• Tropospheric water vapor, convection, and climate (2010, background): “Various models based on assumed local quasi‐equilibrium have emerged to explain aspects of the tropical mean and transient circulation [Emanuel, 2007; Raymond et al., 2009], which must balance horizontal and vertical convergences of moist static energy.”
• Factors controlling the position of the Intertropical Convergence Zone on an aquaplanet (2012, background): “…heating also modifies the large scale circulation: its effect on the vertical motion modifies the gross moist stability [Neelin and Held, 1987; Raymond et al., 2009]; its effect on large scale temperature gradients can modify patterns of winds and hence, through surface fluxes, the…”