Deep Convective Transition Characteristics in the Community Climate System Model and Changes under Global Warming

AbstractTropical deep convective transition characteristics, including precipitation pickup, occurrence probability, and distribution tails related to extreme events, are analyzed using uncoupled and coupled versions of the Community Climate System Model (CCSM) under present-day and global warming conditions. Atmospheric Model Intercomparison Project–type simulations using a 0.5° version of the uncoupled model yield good matches to satellite retrievals for convective transition properties analyzed as a function of bulk measures of water vapor and tropospheric temperature. Present-day simulations with the 1.0° coupled model show transition behavior not very different from that seen in the higher-resolution uncoupled version. Frequency of occurrence of column water vapor (CWV) for precipitating points shows reasonable agreement with the retrievals, including the longer-than-Gaussian tails of the distributions. The probability density functions of precipitating grid points collapse toward similar form when n...