Variations in Gross Moist Stability as a Way to Describe the Relationship between Convection and Its Large-Scale Environment (Invited Presentation)

Dave Raymond has done seminal work on the concept of gross moist stability as a way of describing the relationship of convection to its large-scale environment. When the idea of gross moist stability was first introduced, it was thought that this quantity was relatively constant. Raymond has been at the intellectual forefront of understanding that this quantity varies in important ways in time and space and thinking about the implications of these variations. For his work in this direction, he utilized related influential concepts that he has moved forward like the dependence of rainfall on saturation deficit, moist entropy budgets, weak temperature gradient cloud resolving model simulations, and more. We discuss these concepts, Raymonds contributions to them, and tie them to some recent analysis that we’ve done on the gross moist stability using satellite observations and reanalysis.