Signatures of Heavy Precipitation on the Thermodynamics of Clouds Seen From Satellite: Changes Observed in Temperature Lapse Rates and Missed by Weather Analyses

Abstract

Analyses of the thermodynamics of precipitating clouds are mostly based on localized in situ campaigns or, more globally, weather analyses and reanalyses. This work presents a comparison of weather analyses to satellite observations and a radiometeorological method that shows how precipitating layers inside clouds coincide with weather analyses underestimates of the amount of water vapor. The thermodynamic information from inside precipitating clouds is extracted using observed radio occultation (RO) refractivity profiles without requiring weather analysis input, thus reducing analysis-induced biases. The radiometeorological method is described by first identifying the differences between adiabatically dry, mixing-ratio conserving, and saturated pseudoadiabatic refractivity profiles. These reference profiles are then compared to observed RO refractivity profiles within precipitating and nonprecipitating clouds to infer changes in their height-dependent thermodynamic states and in stability to convection. Precipitation is found to start below layers close to pseudoadiabatic and precipitation layers coincide with changes into conditional stability against convection. A statistical comparison between observed profiles and the gradients predicted for a saturated pseudoadiabatic profile is made and finds that on the global average, precipitation separates clouds from the Clausius-Clapeyron law and profiles are close to a saturated pseudoadiabat. The results (a) help constrain the physical processes associated to precipitation inside clouds and (b) validate the potential of graphical RO techniques to analyze observations without ancillary temperature data from weather analyses.