Radiative Impacts of Island-Based Thunderstorms During MCTEX

The Maritime Continent Thunderstorm Experiment took place from 13 November to 10 December 1995 on the Tiwi Islands, whihc are locatred approximately 70 km north of Darwin Australia at the edge of the tropical "boiler box" region. As part of this project, a suite of remote sensing instruments were deployed in order to observe the properties of the cirrus outflow from the island-based convection in this area. A description of the four-dimensional structure in ice water content from radar measurements allows the modelling of the radiative transfer through the cloud system. The results show a great deal of variablilty in the location and magnitude of the atmospheric radiative heating over the volume of the cloud, and compared to the thunderstorms maritime counterparts from previous studies. For energy budget considerations this shows a need to divide the areas of the TWP covered with small islands from the fully oceanic regimes.