David Raymond’s Insights into the ITCZ (Invited Presentation)

Professor David Raymond’s keen interest in tropical convection inevitably led him to investigate the ITCZ. He proposed that radiative-convective instability plays an important role in the dynamics of the Hadley circulation. This perception later evolved to include other elements for a complete dynamical portrait of the eastern Pacific ITCZ. These elements include the meridional SST gradient, shallow convection, convective inhibition, surface moist entropy fluxes, tropospheric relative humidity, and moist convective instability. His view of ITCZ physics has been tested and refined using observations collected from the field campaign of Eastern Pacific Investigation of Climate in 2001 (EPIC2001), which Professor Raymond led with Steven Esbensen. In contrast to other modern ITCZ paradigms that treat ITCZ convection as a passive consequence of large-scale and global dynamics and energy balance, Professor Raymond firmly believes that interaction between convective systems in the ITCZ and their large-scale environment holds the key to understanding the ITCZ.