The Response of Tropical Rainfall to Idealized Small‐Scale Thermal and Mechanical Forcing

Abstract

Predicting the spatiotemporal distribution of rainfall remains a key challenge in Tropical Meteorology, partly due to an incomplete understanding of the effects of different environmental factors on atmospheric convection. In this work, we use numerical simulations of tropical ocean domains to study how rainfall responds to imposed localized thermal and mechanical forcings to the atmosphere. We use the Normalized Gross Moist Stability—NGMS—to quantify the net precipitation response associated with a given net atmospheric heating. We find that NGMS values differ considerably for different forcings, but show that the relationship between precipitation and column relative humidity collapses along a universal curve across all of them. We also show that the contributions from mean vertical advection of moist and dry static energy only approximate the NGMS well at scales larger than a couple hundred kilometers, indicating that general horizontal mixing processes are not negligible at smaller scales.