Interactions Between Atmospheric Large-scale Regimes and Tropical Convection Properties Using two Decades of Data

Valentin Louf
Seminar

Darwin (on the coast of northern Australia) sits in a mixed Monsoon/Equatorial region. This leads to clearly defined forcing regimes, perfect for testing links between large-scale forcing and atmospheric response. The C-band dual-polarization CPOL radar collected data from 1998 to 2017 providing a dataset where the underlying statistics of convection can be examined.  We use the radar observations of convective clouds and their rainfall properties to characterize the relationship of convective clouds with large-scale conditions. The latter are defined both by using the above broad synoptic classification as well as using estimates of large-scale parameters that are key to tropical convection, such as stability, humidity, convergence, etc.