A New Organization Metric for Synoptic Scale Tropical Convective Aggregation

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https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1029/2022JD036665

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https://doi.org/10.1029/2022JD036665
 http://hdl.handle.net/11603/24511

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Author/Creator ORCID

https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4389-4393

Date

2022-07-27

Type of Work

journal articles
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Citation of Original Publication

Jin, Daeho, Lazaros Oreopoulos, Dongmin Lee, Jackson Tan, and Kyu-myong Kim. “A New Organization Metric for Synoptic Scale Tropical Convective Aggregation.” Journal of Geophysical Research: Atmospheres 127, no. 13 (2022): e2022JD036665. https://doi.org/10.1029/2022JD036665.

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This work was written as part of one of the author's official duties as an Employee of the United States Government and is therefore a work of the United States Government. In accordance with 17 U.S.C. 105, no copyright protection is available for such works under U.S. Law.
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Abstract

Organization metrics were originally developed to measure how densely convective clouds are arranged at mesoscales. In this work, we apply organization metrics to describe tropical synoptic scale convective activity. Such activity is identified by cloud-precipitation (hybrid) regimes defined at 1-degree and 1-hourly resolution. Existing metrics were found to perform inadequately for such convective regime aggregates because the large domain size and co-existence of sparse aggregate occurrences with noisy isolated convection often violate assumptions inherent in these metrics. In order to capture these characteristics, the existing “convective organization potential” (COP) metric was modified so as to: (1) focus on local organization and (2) provide increased weight to aggregate size. The resulting “area-based COP” (ABCOP) is found to outperform existing metrics in tropical convective events at synoptic scales. Moreover, this new organization metric can match the performance of existing metrics, or arguably be better, over a wide range of domain sizes.