References

ACP

Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics

ACP

1680-7324

Copernicus GmbH

Göttingen, Germany

10.5194/acp-11-12517-2011

A Lagrangian view of convective sources for transport of air across the Tropical Tropopause Layer: distribution, times and the radiative influence of clouds

Tzella

¹ ² Legras

Laboratoire de Météorologie Dynamique, CNRS, UMR8539, Ecole Normale Supérieure, 24 rue Lhomond, Paris, 75005, France

now at: School of Mathematics, University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh EH9 3JZ, UK

13 12 2011

11 23 12517 12534

This is an open-access article ditributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

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The tropical tropopause layer (TTL) is a key region controlling transport between the troposphere and the stratosphere. The efficiency of transport across the TTL depends on the continuous interaction between the large-scale advection and the small-scale intermittent convection that reaches the Level of Zero radiative Heating (LZH). The wide range of scales involved presents a significant challenge to determine the sources of convection and quantify transport across the TTL. Here, we use a simple Lagrangian model, termed TTL detrainment model, that combines a large ensemble of 200-day back trajectory calculations with high-resolution fields of brightness temperatures (provided by the CLAUS dataset) in order to determine the ensemble of trajectories that are detrained from convective sources. The trajectories are calculated using the ECMWF ERA-Interim winds and radiative heating rates, and in order to establish the radiative influence of clouds, the latter rates are derived both under all-sky and clear-sky conditions. We show that most trajectories are detrained near the mean LZH with the horizontal distributions of convective sources being highly-localized, even within the space defined by deep convection. As well as modifying the degree of source localization, the radiative heating from clouds facilitates the rapid upwelling of air across the TTL. However, large-scale motion near the fluctuating LZH can lead a significant proportion of trajectories to alternating clear-sky and cloudy regions, thus generating a large dispersion in the vertical transport times. The distributions of vertical transport times are wide and skewed and are largely insensitive to a bias of about ±1 km (∓5 K) in the altitude of cloud top heights (the main sensitivity appearing in the times to escape the immediate neighbourhood of the LZH) while some seasonal and regional transport characteristics are apparent for times up to 60 days. The strong horizontal mixing that characterizes the TTL ensures that most air of convective origin is well-mixed within the tropical and eventually within the extra-tropical lower-stratosphere.

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