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Role of stratiform heating on the organization of convection over the monsoon trough

Climate Dynamics volume 47, pages 3641–3660 (2016)Cite this article

Abstract

It has been recently demonstrated that stratiform heating plays a critical role in the scale-selection of organized tropical convection, in an aquaplanet version of a coarse-resolution atmospheric general circulation model coupled to a stochastic multicloud cumulus parameterization scheme. It is shown that Madden–Julian oscillation-like organization dominates when the model is tuned to produce strong and long lived stratiform heating while it gives rise to mostly convectively coupled waves in the case of weak and short lived stratiform clouds. The study is extended here to the case of an asymmetric forcing mimicking the migration of the intertropical convergence zone (ITCZ) during summer to understand the impact of changes in stratiform heating on the monsoon dynamics. Consistent with the equatorial ITCZ case, strong and long lived stratiform heating promotes northward and eastward moving intraseasonal disturbances while weak and short lived stratiform heating yields mostly westward propgating synoptic scale low pressure systems. Moreover, the underlying intraseasonal versus low pressure system activity seems to impact the strength and extend of the monsoon trough (MT). In the regime with intraseasonal activity the MT is much stronger and extends northward while in the low pressure system case MT is some what weaker in strength but extends further westward. In the low pressure dominated regime, the background vorticity and zonal wind profiles over the monsoon trough are consistent with the observations.

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Acknowledgments

The Center for Prototype Climate Modelling (CPCM) is fully funded by the Abu Dhabi Government through New York University Abu Dhabi (NYUAD) Research Institute grant. This research was initiated during an extended visit of BK and AM to the CPCM at NYUAD during winter 2014. The computations were carried out on the High Performance Computing resources at NYUAD and early tuning of the code were done at the University of Victoria using the West Grid computing Network. The research of AM is partially supported by the Office of Naval Research Grant ONR MURI N00014-12-1-0912. The research of BK is partially funded by Monsoon Mission Project, MoES, Government of India.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Center for Prototype Climate Modelling, New York University Abu Dhabi, P.O. Box 129188, Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates

    R. S. Ajayamohan, Andrew J. Majda & Qiang Deng

  2. Department of Mathematics and Statistics, University of Victoria, STN CSC, P.O. BOX 3045, Victoria, BC, V8W 3P4, Canada

    Boualem Khouider

  3. Department of Mathematics and Center for Atmosphere-Ocean Science, Courant Institute, New York University, 251 Mercer Street, New York, NY, 10012, USA

    Andrew J. Majda

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  1. R. S. Ajayamohan
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Ajayamohan, R.S., Khouider, B., Majda, A.J. et al. Role of stratiform heating on the organization of convection over the monsoon trough. Clim Dyn 47, 3641–3660 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00382-016-3033-7

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Keywords

  • Stratiform heating
  • Organized convection
  • Stochastic parametrization
  • Monsoon trough
  • Monsoon Intraseasonal oscillations
  • Northward propagation
  • Low pressure systems