Exploring Land-Ocean Differences in Precipitation Evolution and Convective Development in Tropical Storms Using the IMERG-Based Convection Tracking Dataset

This study uses the IMERG-based Convection Tracking (IMERG-CT) dataset to explore the land-ocean differences in the evolution of precipitation and convective development. Traditionally, precipitation datasets have been based on Eulerian accumulations, but IMERG-CT enables the estimation of total rainfall using Lagrangian accumulations. This represents a significant advancement in diagnosing cloud-precipitation processes as they follow the evolution of air masses. By analyzing properties such as lifetime-accumulated precipitation amount and maximum intensity as functions of precipitation system size, this study demonstrates the utility of IMERG-CT in investigating the evolution of convective systems before and after peak precipitation rates and amounts, and how this evolution differs over land and ocean. Furthermore, our study underscores the importance of jointly analyzing cloud and precipitation data over time, which aids in elucidating the dynamic processes responsible for tropical rainfall and its effects on atmospheric thermodynamics. These results have important implications for understanding how the characteristics of convective clouds and cloud-precipitation processes over land and ocean fundamentally differ in nature.