タイトル | Possible Importance of Convection Near the Tropical Tropopause |
著者(英) | Sherwood, Steven C.; Einaudi, Franco |
著者所属(英) | NASA Goddard Space Flight Center |
発行日 | 2000-01-01 |
言語 | eng |
内容記述 | Most studies of convection and its interaction with the large-scale behavior of the atmosphere focus on the convective heating and drying in the troposphere up to perhaps 15 km. Above this, effects become difficult to measure and are sometimes assumed to vanish. Here I discuss the possible effects of overshooting and irreversible mixing above the level of neutral buoyancy of convective updrafts. These effects should include cooling and drying of the atmosphere near the tropopause. Observational and model support exists for each of these. An argument can be made that the relative role played by the details of convective physics and microphysics in influencing gross atmospheric behavior may be greater and more observable near the tropopause than it is at lower levels in the troposphere where most of the attention has been directed. This has implications not only for our understanding of the tropical tropopause region, but also for where we should be looking to learn more about the physics of convection itself and to obtain observations that can usefully discriminate between different schemes for representing convection in large-scale models. |
NASA分類 | Geophysics |
権利 | No Copyright |
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