[1] This paper evaluates geo-seasonal relationships in tropical deep convection using radar and infrared data from Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission (TRMM), near tropopause thin clouds from Stratospheric Air and Gas Experiment (SAGE) II, water vapor and carbon monoxide (CO) from the Earth Observing System (EOS) Microwave Limb Sounder (MLS), and the tropopause temperature from National Center ...

Stratospheric aerosols (SAs) are a variable component of the Earth’s albedo that may be intentionally enhanced in the future to offset greenhouse gases (geoengineering). The role of tropospheric-sourced sulfur dioxide (SO2) in maintaining background SAs has been debated for decades without in situ measurements of SO2 at the tropical tropopause to inform this issue. Here we clarify the role of S...

Observations indicate that the height of the tropopause-the boundary between the stratosphere and troposphere-has increased by several hundred meters since 1979. Comparable increases are evident in climate model experiments. The latter show that human-induced changes in ozone and well-mixed greenhouse gases account for approximately 80% of the simulated rise in tropopause height over 1979-1999....

Using a passive tracer, entrainment is studied in cloud-resolving simulations of oceanic deep convection in radiative-convective equilibrium. It is found that the convective flux of undiluted parcels decays with height exponentially, indicating a constant probability per vertical distance of mixing with environmental air. This probability per distance is sufficiently large that undiluted updraf...

If tropical tropopause cirrus lie above convective anvils with tops above about 13km, then net radiative cooling from the cirrus can be produced that is large enough to offset significant subsidence heating, even at the lowest temperatures observed in the tropics. Cirrus clouds near the tropopause are strongly heated by radiation unless they lie above convective anvil clouds. Radiative relaxati...

Collocated observations of cloud-top height and cloud-profiling information from 14 CloudSat and MODIS cloud-top temperature are analyzed to determine where convective 15 cloud top occurs in relation to the cold point tropopause and the internal vertical structure 16 of these deep convective clouds. Three types of penetrating convection identified as cold17 low (CL), cold-high (CH), and warm-hi...

Upper tropospheric and lower stratospheric measurements from the Aura Microwave Limb Sounder (MLS), the Aura High Resolution Dynamics Limb Sounder (HIRDLS), and the Atmospheric Chemistry Experiment-Fourier transform spectrometer (ACE-FTS) are used to present the first global climatological comparison of extratropical, nonpolar trace gas distributions in double-tropopause (DT) and single-tropopa...

[1] Recent high-resolution radiosonde climatologies have revealed a tropopause inversion layer (TIL) in the extratropics: temperature strongly increases just above a sharp local cold point tropopause. Here, it is asked to what extent a TIL exists in current general circulation models (GCMs) and meteorological analyses. Only a weak hint of a TIL exists in NCEP/NCAR reanalysis data. In contrast, ...

[1] During the July 2002 CRYSTAL-FACE field program based from Key West, Florida, aircraft measurements showed that long-lived thin tropopause cirrus (TTC) layers were often present above thunderstorm anvils. This paper describes these clouds and explores their possible origins. Measurements showed that the horizontal dimensions of TTC layers were nearly identical to convectively formed anvils ...

Anewmethod that combines radar reflectivities from individualNextGenerationWeatherRadars (NEXRAD) into a three-dimensional composite with high horizontal and vertical resolution is used to estimate storm-top altitudes for the continental United States east of the RockyMountains. Echo-top altitudes are compared with the altitude of the lapse-rate tropopause calculated from the ERA-Interim reanal...