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Benjamin Lintner
UCLA
Date: November 19, 2008
3:00 pm: Conversation and Cookies in Room 108 Atmospheric Sciences Building
3:30 pm: Seminar in Room 144 Loomis Lab
As the transition zones between strongly-convecting and nonconvecting regimes, the near-edge environments of tropical convection zones—or convective margins—are subject to significant variability on multiple timescales. The sensitivity of tropical convective margin regions to climate perturbations, including projected anthropogenic climate change, underscores the need for mechanistic understanding of the dynamic and thermodynamic factors controlling convective margins and their variability. In this talk, I develop a simple prototype to describe the behavior of idealized convective margins in regions of low-level inflow from a dry region into the convection zone. The prototype is applied to the analysis of the regional rainfall characteristics of the El Niño/Southern Oscillation (ENSO) tropical teleconnection and high-frequency inflow-moisture-precipitation relationships along the South Pacific Convergence Zone (SPCZ). Additionally, results illustrating the effects of interactive land surface conditions (soil moisture) on margin characteristics and using Lagrangian back trajectory analysis to characterize the flow in and around convection zones are presented. Implications of the convective margins approach for issues such as model evaluation and intercomparison and bias mitigation are also highlighted |
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