Atmosphere Ocean Science Friday Seminar

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Radiation impacts on Hurricane-like Vortices in Conditionally Unstable Moist Convection

Speaker: Mu-Hua Chien, CAOS

Location: Online

Date: Friday, October 23, 2020, 4 p.m.

Notes:

This work analyzes the impacts of radiative cooling in three dimensional high-resolution direct numerical simulations of moist Rayleigh-Bénard convection in the presence of rotation. A conditionally unstable atmosphere on an f-plane is destabilized by a given uniform radiative cooling. In the previous study, conditionally unstable moist Rayleigh-Bénard convection in the presence of rotation and in the absence of radiative transfers produces hurricane-like vortices. These vortices are limited by diffusion and are unable to transfer much energy.  As radiative cooling partially compensates for the adiabatic warming in the unsaturated environment and destabilizes the lower unsaturated boundary. The inclusion of radiative cooling results in a significant enhancement of convective activity and cloud cover so that the hurricane-like vortices are unable to develop in the presence of radiative cooling.