Current research

The relationship between large-scale and convective states in the tropics. It is the aim of this proposal to apply a combination of long-term observations taken by ARM and the Australian Bureau of Meteorology in the tropics and simulations using Cloud Resolving Models (CRMs) to comprehensively explore the relationships between the large and convective scales and to translate the findings into improvements of the representation of convection in a world-leading climate and Numerical Weather Prediction model.

As part of this project the large-scale atmospheric state has been derived. The data is available through the ARM PI site: add link but the documentation is here: Large-scale documentation and a view of the netcdf header is here: netcdf header

Sources of Tropical Mid-tropospheric Water Vapour. Several recent studies have reported an exponential relationship between tropical column water vapour and rainfall. Those studies also showed that this relationship is largely one between rainfall and free tropospheric water vapour. We are able to reproduce these results using three years of radar-derived rainfall and objectively analyzed large-scale states at the Darwin ARM site. Our goal is to extend previous work by elucidating the sources of mid-tropospheric water vapour associated with rainfall.

ARM POSTER. Some of the intial results from this project are being presented at the ARM meeting (15-18 March) in Portland, USA. A pdf of this poster can be downloaded here: ARM poster

ARM POSTER March 2012. A poster presenting some of our findings on relatioships between cloud types and the large-scale atmosphere and also on whether these relationships can be reproduced in a cloud-system resolving model is being presented at the ARM meeting (12-16 March) in Arlington, Virginia. The ppt files of this poster can be downloaded here: ARM poster 2O12