SMART-R, the Shared Mobile Atmospheric Research and Teaching Radar, was part of the DYNAMO/CINDY/AMIE field campaign observational array. Diabatic heating and divergence profiles are useful snapshots of a convecting atmosphere that can help us understand the effects of a planetary scale event such as the MJO on the smaller convective and meso scales. The new tilt corrected and quality controlled SMART-R data was used to obtain latent heating profiles based on Schumacher et al. (2004). This allowed us to observe variations in local latent heating profiles with respect to the phase and amplitude of the Madden-Julian Oscillation (MJO), especially the quantification of low-level heating during the initiation phases. Divergence profiles obtained using the CYLBIN technique reveal the presence of congestus cloud systems, with convergence at low levels and divergence at midlevels.
A new Weather and Research Forecasting model (WRF) based algorithm to estimate latent heating profiles is also introduced. The algorithm uses only convective and stratiform cell area and echo tops to prepare a latent heating look-up table. This novel approach obviates the need for rain rate estimation, which is necessary in all other radar retrievals of latent heating, The WRF based lookup table algorithm (WRFLT) is applied to reflectivity data from S-Pol. A comparison is done between WRFLT, the Schumacher et al. convective-stratiform algorithm (CS), and heating from the variational analysis (VA). With respect to VA, WRFLT does a reasonable job of estimating the heating at mid and upper levels, but overestimates the shallow heating, which is an artifact of the underlying WRF simulation
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