Atmosphere Ocean Science Colloquium

---

On the decrease of tropical deep convection with global warming

Speaker: Nadir Jeevanjee, GFDL

Location: Warren Weaver Hall 1302

Date: Wednesday, October 19, 2022, 3:30 p.m.

Synopsis:

Tropical deep convection and their associated high `anvil' clouds are key players in the climate system, and are expected to decrease with global warming in various ways.  The areal coverage of anvil clouds is expected to decrease, for instance, as is the average mass flux of cloudy air at the top of the planetary boundary layer. But the interrelationship between these decreases is not well understood, nor do we understand why some effects seem more robust than others. This talk will demonstrate that all these phenomena stem from a basic mismatch between how radiation and moisture scale with global warming, and will evaluate theoretically which behaviors should be robust. We will employ a hierarchy of models in this effort, ranging from pencil-and-paper calculations to global climate model simulations.