Anvil Productivities of Tropical Deep Convective Clusters and Their Regional Differences

¹ Department of Atmospheric Science, University of Wyoming, Laramie, Wyoming, 820072, USA
² University of Utah, Salt lake City, USA

^* mdeng2@uwyo.edu

Published online: 7 June 2016

Abstract

Tropical deep convection’s intensity and their anvil productivity are investigated and compared among 8 climatological regions with 4-year collocated and combined CloudSat and CALIPSO data. For all 8 regions, the convective clusters become deeper, while they become wider and tend to be composed of multiple rainy cores. Among 8 regions, convective clusters at the same scale over EP and AT tend to have less but wider rainy cores than those at WP, MA and IO, while those over AF, IO, MA and AM tend to have higher cloud top than those over ocean. For convective clusters less than 300 km wide over AF and MA, the rainy cores pump more ice mass of larger particles to the mid- and upper troposphere in strong updrafts.

The total anvil clouds detrained from convection counts for 0.4 to 0.8 of the cluster horizontal scale, 0.2 to 0.6 of the cluster cross section volume, and 0.05 to 0.20 of the cluster ice mass, depending on the cluster scales and height. There are two main detrainment layers. When the convective clusters is less than about 100 km, the anvil clouds are mainly detrained at about 6-8 km with a spreading ratio (ratio of maximum cluster width to convection rainy core width) less than 1.5. When convective clusters becomes 100 km or wider, it reaches the dominate detrainment layer at about 12 km, the detrainment index increase from 2 to more 6. Among 8 regions, convection clusters in MA produce the most anvil volume fraction. The more the ice mass is pumped upward in the anvil clouds till clusters are about 500 km wider. Nevertheless, the anvil ice mass pumped above 15 km is less than 0.1% of the total ice mass in the convective cluster.