Latent heating profiles and the self-amplification of deep convection

Episodes of organized deep convection in the tropics generally begin with bottom- heavy latent heating and vertical motion that progressively deepens as the convection develops and eventually become top-heavy and stratiform. This structure is seen in convectively-coupled equatorial waves, the MJO, and even individual mesoscale convective systems. The vertical profile of convection also has a strong impact on numerical simulations of the MJO, convectively-coupled waves and convective organization in general. We use several recent reanalyses to examine the hypothesis that bottom-heavy vertical motion profiles are associated with the self-amplification of deep convection via a negative effective gross moist stability.