Assessment of a Satellite-Based Atmospheric Budget Analysis Method Using CINDY2011/DYNAMO/AMIE and TOGA COARE Sounding Array Data

Abstract

A satellite-based method of moisture and thermal budget analysis is examined in comparison with sounding array observations from Cooperative Indian Ocean experiment on Intraseasonal variability in the Year of 2011 (CINDY2011)/Dynamics of the Madden-Julian Oscillation (MJO) (DYNAMO)/Atmospheric Radiation Measurements (ARM) MJO Investigation Experiment (AMIE) and from the Tropical Ocean Global Atmosphere Coupled Ocean Atmosphere Response Experiment (TOGA COARE). Overall, the satellite analysis is found to quantitatively reproduce the statistical behaviors of large-scale mean vertical motion, moisture convergence, and moist static energy (MSE) convergence as observed from the sounding arrays. However, individual convective events generally do not delineate a systematic evolutionary track but are heavily spread around the ensemble mean of moisture and MSE convergences in composite space.Next, the convective events are broken down into "developing", "off-centered", and "passing-by" classes using geostationary infrared measurements in an attempt to sort irrelevant samples that are not representative of convective dynamics. All the three composite classes show qualitatively similar evolutions except for the amplitude of variability, with genuine developing events being greatest in amplitude and passing-by disturbances being weakest. The spread among individual events is substantially reduced when the convective events immune to strong synoptic-scale influences are isolated and the contribution of horizontal advection is excluded from MSE convergence.

Convective and large‐scale mass flux profiles over tropical oceans determined from synergistic analysis of a suite of satellite observations

“…The composite time series shown in this work are hence constructed with a reasonably large body of statistics. The robustness of the composite statistics, including the potential errors due to the migration of convective disturbances, has been assessed in Masunaga [].…”

“…The large‐scale vertical motion (section 2.3) is constructed with a longer period from 1 December 2002 to 30 November 2009 to ensure the statistical robustness in the composite time series (section 2.4). The difference in the temporal length is not essential since the composite statistics are known to be insensitive to the choice of the analysis period [ Masunaga , ].…”

“…The sources of errors examined here are the prescribed assumptions in the plume model as investigated in section 3.1 and the measurement errors ( z and T ) assumed for the Bayesian estimation (section 3.2). Other uncertainties related to cloud top buoyancy (section 2.2), large-scale mean vertical motion (section 2.3), and the composite satellite soundings (section 2.4) are discussed elsewhere [Luo et al, 2010;Masunaga, 2012Masunaga, , 2013Masunaga, , 2015 and are not repeated here. Figure A1 summarizes the error analysis results at three pressure levels.…”