Impacts of Convective Triggering on Convective Variability in a Climate Model

Abstract:

In this study, we investigated the impacts of the triggering designs of the deep convection scheme on convective variability from diurnal rainfall cycle to intraseasonal rainfall variability by using NCAR CAM5 model. Using single-column simulations at the Southern Great Plains site, we found that the underestimated nighttime rainfall of diurnal cycle can be greatly improved when two convective triggering designs from the Simplified Arakawa-Schubert scheme (SAS) are implemented into the default Zhang-Mcfarlane (ZM) scheme. We further conducted AMIP-type climate simulations with this modified ZM scheme (ZMMOD), and found that improvements can also be seen for the diurnally propagating convection over topographical regions, such as Maritime Continent and the western coast of Columbia. We further examined the rainfall variability from synoptic to intraseasonal scales, and found that using ZMMOD scheme increases rainfall variability of 2-10-day over South America and Africa land regions. However, this improvement does not seem to transfer to the intraseasonal convective organization (20-100 days), such as the MJO. This study demonstrates the importance of convective triggering and its impacts on convective variability. This work is still on-going to understand the physical processes of such impacts and how they might affect climate systems through multiscale interactions.