Variations of tropical deep convective systems with sea surface temperature and precipitation efficiency

The size, areal coverage and rainfall efficiency of tropical deep convective systems (DCS) and their variations with SST are estimated using 8 months (Jan. ~ Aug. 1998) of data from multiple Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission (TRMM) sensors, namely Clouds and the Earth's Radiant Energy System (CERES), TRMM Microwave Imager (TMI) and Visible and InfraRed Scanner (VIRS) in current study. Generally, the areal coverage of DCSs increases with SST even the precipitation and rainfall efficiency increase with SST. The change of the cloud area coverage with temperature obtained from TRMM data is about 7%/K. Besides the cloud areal coverage, DCS cluster effective sizes also increase with precipitation. These changes of DCS properties could produce a net cooling effect for the earth's climate system due to strong reflection of DCS on solar radiation. These results have great potential in improvements of modeled tropical high cloud feedbacks.