Short-term versus climatological relationship between precipitation and tropospheric humidity

Abstract

In this study the observed relationship of precipitation with column relative humidity (CRH), a metric of tropospheric humidity, is examined in order to address a known discrepancy inherent to past studies. A composite analysis of satellite data is carried out to explore the short-term (i.e., from hourly to daily) atmospheric variability for comparison with the climatology, hypothesizing that a primary cause for the discrepancy arises from a difference in the time scale of interest. The analysis is broken down into four classes on the basis of the degree of convective organization, ranging from unorganized shallow cumuli to highly organized convective systems. The CRH-precipitation relationship is found to be extremely nonlinear for the shortterm variability, while the nonlinearity weakens to some degree when different convective systems in diverse humidity environments are averaged together into climatology. The weak exponential rise in the climatological CRH-precipitation curve occurs because highly organized convective systems become more frequent and intense and thus receive increasing weight in the climatological mean as the environment moistens. © 2012 American Meteorological Society.