Identification

Title

A global climatology of diabatic heating in Tropical Easterly Waves

Abstract

Tropical easterly waves (TEWs) play a critical role in regulating convection and precipitation across the global tropics. TEWs act as seed disturbances for tropical cyclogenesis, serve as an essential component in monsoon precipitation, and produce large amounts of rainfall and diabatic heating that can strongly affect the large-scale circulation. To help improve our knowledge of a more elusive type of tropical wave, we use satellite and reanalysis estimates of the diabatic heating associated with TEWs that are identified by a tracking algorithm based on low-level curvature vorticity. This study uses the Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission (TRMM) version 6 convective-stratiform heating (CSH) and spectral latent heating (SLH) orbital products to create a global climatology (1998-2015) of TEW diabatic heating. TEW-specific composites for the satellite -observed vertical structure of diabatic heating are compared to similar terms from MERRA-2 across a variety of tropical regions. There are striking differences between the reanalysis and satellite heating with MERRA-2 having much stronger background heating, especially at low levels. Both the satellite -observed and reanalysis heating profiles show stronger midlevel heating associated with TEWs relative to the unconditional background. Similar patterns of mid- and bottom -heaviness emerge in two-dimensional composites of TEW latent heating as stronger heating rates and percent contributions to the background are generally higher at 500 hPa than at 850 hPa. Although TEWs only represent a few percent of the background heating across the global tropics, they comprise 30%-50% of the heating in the prominent TEW tracks over the northeastern Atlantic and Pacific Oceans.

Resource type

document

Resource locator

Unique resource identifier

code

https://n2t.org/ark:/85065/d7xg9w9j

codeSpace

Dataset language

eng

Spatial reference system

code identifying the spatial reference system

Classification of spatial data and services

Topic category

geoscientificInformation

Keywords

Keyword set

keyword value

Text

originating controlled vocabulary

title

Resource Type

reference date

date type

publication

effective date

2016-01-01T00:00:00Z

Geographic location

West bounding longitude

East bounding longitude

North bounding latitude

South bounding latitude

Temporal reference

Temporal extent

Begin position

End position

Dataset reference date

date type

publication

effective date

2024-03-15T00:00:00Z

Frequency of update

Quality and validity

Lineage

Conformity

Data format

name of format

version of format

Constraints related to access and use

Constraint set

Use constraints

Limitations on public access

None

Responsible organisations

Responsible party

contact position

OpenSky Support

organisation name

UCAR/NCAR - Library

full postal address

PO Box 3000

Boulder

80307-3000

email address

opensky@ucar.edu

web address

http://opensky.ucar.edu/

name: homepage

responsible party role

pointOfContact

Metadata on metadata

Metadata point of contact