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Stronger zonal convective clustering associated with a wider tropical rain belt

Deep convection can exhibit a large diversity of spatial organizations along the equator. The form of organization may affect the tropical large-scale motions of the atmosphere, but observational evidence is currently missing. Here we show using observations that when convection along the equator is...

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Autores principales: Popp, Max, Bony, Sandrine
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: Nature Publishing Group UK 2019
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6753108/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/31537785
http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41467-019-12167-9
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author Popp, Max
Bony, Sandrine
author_facet Popp, Max
Bony, Sandrine
author_sort Popp, Max
collection PubMed
description Deep convection can exhibit a large diversity of spatial organizations along the equator. The form of organization may affect the tropical large-scale motions of the atmosphere, but observational evidence is currently missing. Here we show using observations that when convection along the equator is more clustered in the zonal direction, the tropical rain belt widens in the meridional direction, and exhibits a double-peak structure. About half of the influence of the convective clustering on the width of the rain belt is associated with the annual cycle and the other half is associated with unforced climate variability. Idealized climate model experiments show that the zonal convective clustering alone can explain the observed behavior and that the behavior can be explained with an energetic framework. This demonstrates that the representation of equatorial convective clustering is important for modeling the tropical rainfall distribution accurately.
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spelling pubmed-67531082019-09-23 Stronger zonal convective clustering associated with a wider tropical rain belt Popp, Max Bony, Sandrine Nat Commun Article Deep convection can exhibit a large diversity of spatial organizations along the equator. The form of organization may affect the tropical large-scale motions of the atmosphere, but observational evidence is currently missing. Here we show using observations that when convection along the equator is more clustered in the zonal direction, the tropical rain belt widens in the meridional direction, and exhibits a double-peak structure. About half of the influence of the convective clustering on the width of the rain belt is associated with the annual cycle and the other half is associated with unforced climate variability. Idealized climate model experiments show that the zonal convective clustering alone can explain the observed behavior and that the behavior can be explained with an energetic framework. This demonstrates that the representation of equatorial convective clustering is important for modeling the tropical rainfall distribution accurately. Nature Publishing Group UK 2019-09-19 /pmc/articles/PMC6753108/ /pubmed/31537785 http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41467-019-12167-9 Text en © The Author(s) 2019 Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.
spellingShingle Article
Popp, Max
Bony, Sandrine
Stronger zonal convective clustering associated with a wider tropical rain belt
title Stronger zonal convective clustering associated with a wider tropical rain belt
title_full Stronger zonal convective clustering associated with a wider tropical rain belt
title_fullStr Stronger zonal convective clustering associated with a wider tropical rain belt
title_full_unstemmed Stronger zonal convective clustering associated with a wider tropical rain belt
title_short Stronger zonal convective clustering associated with a wider tropical rain belt
title_sort stronger zonal convective clustering associated with a wider tropical rain belt
topic Article
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6753108/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/31537785
http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41467-019-12167-9
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