Abstract:

This research aims to improve our understanding of climate by investigating the moist convection responding to warming climate in idealized simulations. This idealized framework contains three critical components for climate dynamics: simplified moist thermodynamics for the condensation of water vapor, a conditionally unstable environment, and prescribed radiation cooling. The simulations can simulate the convective self-aggregation and hurricane-like vortices responding to the lapse rate feedback and an increase in net radiative cooling. The overturning circulation is considered over isentropic coordinate, where the entropy is conserved over the reversible processes. The primary result shows a deceleration in the isentropic overturning circulation in the warming scenarios, majorly due to the irreversible mixing. The increased lapse rate suppresses turbulent mixing in the boundary layer, which prevents convective cores from mixing with external unsaturated air. This mechanism increases the mechanical efficiency of moist convection despite a decrease in sensible and latent heat flux.