@article{d1a016b438a24a0585a15f5428981218,
title = "Increased Frequency of Extreme Tropical Deep Convection: AIRS Observations and Climate Model Predictions",
abstract = "Atmospheric Infrared Sounder (AIRS) data from the tropical oceans (30°N to 30°S) are used to derive the probability of the process resulting in deep convective clouds (DCCs) as function of the sea surface temperature (SST). For DCC at or below the tropopause the onset temperature of this process shifts at the same rate as the increase in the mean SST. For tropopause overshooting DCC, which are associated with extreme rain events, the shift of the onset temperature is slower, causing their frequency to increase by about 21%/K of warming of the oceans. This sensitivity is not inconsistent with the sensitivity of the increase of extreme deep convective rain in the National Center for Atmospheric Research Community Atmosphere Model version 5 model for a warmer SST. The mean of the 36 fifth Phase of the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project models predicts a 2.7 K warmer tropical SST by the end of this century, resulting in a 60% increases in the frequency of tropopause overshooting DCC.",
keywords = "AIRS, climate models, climate sensitivity, severe storms",
author = "Aumann, {Hartmut H.} and Ali Behrangi and Yuan Wang",
note = "Funding Information: The research described in this paper was carried out at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, under a contract with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. We are grateful for the unwavering support of Ramesh Kakar of NASA Headquarters. We acknowledge the helpful comments of an anonymous reviewer on the subject of convective stability. The daily collection of AIRS DCC, merged with the NOAA SST, is found in the AIRS Calibration Data Subset (ACDS), available freely from the Goddard Earth Sciences Data and Information Services Center at https://disc.gsfc.nasa.gov/AIRS. The NCAR CAM5 simulations were conducted on the NASA Pleiades supercomputer. The CESM source code can be downloaded from http://www.cesm.ucar.edu/. The AMSRE data are freely available from ftp://ftp.remss.com/amsre/bmaps_v07/. The CMIP5 RCP 8.5 data can be downloaded from cmip-pcmdi.llnl.gov/cmip5/data_portal.html. They are served free of charge by the Earth System Grid Federation (ESGF). The RTGSST is freely available from ftp://polar.ncep.noaa.gov/pub/history/sst/rtg_low_res. Publisher Copyright: {\textcopyright}2018. American Geophysical Union. All Rights Reserved.",
year = "2018",
month = dec,
day = "28",
doi = "10.1029/2018GL079423",
language = "English (US)",
volume = "45",
pages = "13,530--13,537",
journal = "Geophysical Research Letters",
issn = "0094-8276",
publisher = "John Wiley and Sons Inc.",
number = "24",
}