Premium
Tropical climate described as a distribution of weather states indicated by distinct mesoscale cloud property mixtures
Author(s) -
Rossow William B.,
Tselioudis George,
Polak Allyson,
Jakob Christian
Publication year - 2005
Publication title -
geophysical research letters
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 2.007
H-Index - 273
eISSN - 1944-8007
pISSN - 0094-8276
DOI - 10.1029/2005gl024584
Subject(s) - mesoscale meteorology , climatology , environmental science , diabatic , cloud computing , tropical cyclone , climate model , tropics , scale (ratio) , meteorology , atmospheric sciences , climate change , geography , geology , computer science , cartography , oceanography , physics , adiabatic process , thermodynamics , operating system , fishery , biology
An analysis approach that uses the patterns of cloud property joint distributions at mesoscale (cloud type mixtures) from the International Satellite Cloud Climatology Project to identify distinct weather states of the tropical atmosphere is extended to the whole tropics covering the period 1983–2004. These patterns can be used as the basis for multi‐scale, multi‐variate compositing of other observations to understand how tropical cloud systems affect the atmospheric diabatic heating and interact with the large scale circulation. We illustrate how variations of the tropical climate on longer time scales can be described in terms of the changes in the frequency of occurrence of these weather states with their associated multi‐variate relationships.