The role and timescale of the moisture-entrainment-convection feedback
in Spontaneous TC genesis
Abstract
Tropical cyclones (TCs) are one of the most fascinating examples of
organized convection. In idealized simulations of rotating
radiative-convective equilibrium (RRCE), TCs can self-emerge without the
need for a pre-existing disturbance. In a recent study, Ramírez Reyes
and Yang (2021) showed that in contrast to prevailing knowledge (e.g.,
Muller and Romps (2018)), spontaneous TC genesis can occur without
radiative and surface-flux feedbacks. Here we explore the hypothesis
that under these conditions, the moisture-entrainment-convection (MEC)
feedback is responsible for the spontaneous TC genesis. In the MEC
feedback, a moister environment favors new deep convective events, and
their associated large-scale circulations and detrainment processes
further moisten the environment, leading to aggregation of deep
convection. We examine the role of the MEC feedback in spontaneous TC
genesis using RRCE simulations (Ramírez Reyes and Yang, 2021), in which
we weaken the MEC feedback by relaxing the clear-sky specific humidity
to its horizontal average throughout the entire column. TCs can still
self-emerge when we weaken the MEC feedback, but TC intensity
monotonically decreases as we reduce the relaxation time scale. TCs can
no longer appear in the 100-day simulations when the relaxation time
scale is reduced to 3 hours. We then relax the clear-sky specific
humidity to its horizontal mean at individual vertical layers and find
that weakening the MEC feedback below 7km significantly decreases TC
intensity. However, nudging specific humidity above 7km has a much
weaker impact. We will also present further analyses to test the
hypothesis by using vorticity, the available potential energy (APE)
budget and a vertically resolved moist static energy framework (Yao,
Yang, Tan 2021). Ramírez Reyes, A., & Yang, D. (2020). Spontaneous
Cyclogenesis without Radiative and Surface-Flux Feedbacks. arXiv
preprint arXiv:2004.08662. Muller, C. J., & Romps, D. M. (2018).
Acceleration of tropical cyclogenesis by self-aggregation feedbacks.
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 115(12), 2930-2935.
Yao, L., Yang, D., & Tan, Z. M. (2020). A Vertically Resolved MSE
Framework Highlights the Role of the Boundary Layer in Convective
Self-Aggregation. arXiv preprint arXiv:2008.10158