Analysis of Heat and Moisture Budgets from the NAME Enhanced Sounding Network

Previous studies of the North American Monsoon (NAM) have been hampered by the lack of observations, particularly over Mexico. During the summer of 2004, the North American Monsoon Experiment (NAME) established an enhanced observational network over Mexico and the southwestern United States aimed at determining the sources and limits of predictability of warm season precipitation associated with the NAM. Nested within the larger NAME observational network, an enhanced budget array (EBA) with 4-6 daily sonde launches was deployed over the southern Gulf of California extending eastward into northwestern Mexico to study the diurnal cycle over the core of the monsoon region.

This study makes use of this unprecedented sound dataset to compute the heat and moisture budgets over the EBA of NAME. These budget diagnostics, based solely on observations, will be shown highlighting the diurnal cycle in NAME and differences between continental and maritime convection. In addition, these observationally-based budgets will be compared to those computed from various model analyses, such s the NCEP reanalysis and North American Regional Reanalysis (NARR). It is hoped that such comparisons will help elucidate the strengths and weaknesses in the parameterization schemes within these models with the ultimate goal to improve their performance.