Tropical climate described as a distribution of weather states indicated by distinct mesoscale cloud property mixtures

Abstract

An analysis approach that uses the patterns of cloud property joint distributions at mesoscale (cloud type mixtures) from the International Satellite Cloud Climatology Project to identify distinct weather states of the tropical atmosphere is extended to the whole tropics covering the period 1983-2004. These patterns can be used as the basis for multi-scale, multi-variate compositing of other observations to understand how tropical cloud systems affect the atmospheric diabatic heating and interact with the large scale circulation. We illustrate how variations of the tropical climate on longer time scales can be described in terms of the changes in the frequency of occurrence of these weather states with their associated multivariate relationships. Copyright 2005 by the American Geophysical Union.