Rainfall Characteristics And Latent Heating Structure Of Deep Convective Systems In Tropical Deep Convective Regions

Tropical deep convective systems are key factors in modulating the diabatic heating structure and hence affecting the atmospheric general circulation. Further quantifying latent heating (LH) structures associated with different categories of deep convective systems will benefit our understanding on interactions between different clouds systems and the general circulation.Coincident scenarios of TRMM PR and MODIS in 2006～2011 are picked up to combine their advantages so as to quantify latent heating structures associated with different categories of deep convective systems and their contributions to the three-dimensional structure of tropical LH.The PR corrected Z factor (CZF) of connected mesoscale convective systems (CMCSs) is weaker than separated mesoscale convective systems (SMCSs) of the same size in upper troposphere (>7km). Systematically, the stratiform rain occurs more often in CMCSs according to the data of PR rain type. The rain rate of CMCSs is higher than other systems as well. When the size of deep convective systems enlarges, both the percentage of stratiform rain and the rain rate increase consistently, which is consistent with previous findings showing that larger stratiform rain areas are usually associated with the higher environmental moist static energy.Further investigations on deep convective systems reveal that deep convective systems in oceanic regions show more similar structures in CZF and LH profiles of a specific rain type normalized by dividing the precipitation of that type in different systems are almost the same. While continental deep convective systems tend to penetrate deeper and the heights of their LH maximum are lower compared to oceanic systems because the percentage of stratiform rain in oceanic deep convective systems is higher. LH profiles of a specific rain type normalized by dividing the precipitation of that type in different systems also show nearly the same structures for different continental regions. Therefore a method is established to estimate the regional LH profile based on the percentage of precipitation or frequency of each kind of systems. Thus this method can be used to reconstruct the spatial-temporal distribution of LH of deep convective systems in various regions under different synoptic and climatic conditions according to the occurrence frequency of deep convective systems. This method can be applied on all A-train MODIS data to fuel future research on better understanding effects of LH of deep convective systems on synoptic and climatic phenomena (i.e. MJO, ENSO, and monsoon).