Surface Fluxes and Tropical Intraseasonal Variability: a Reassessment

Abstract

The authors argue that interactive feedbacks involving surface moist enthalpy fluxes, both turbulent and radiative, are important to the dynamics of tropical intraseasonal variability. Evidence in favor of this hypothesis includes the observed spatial distribution of intraseasonal variance in precipitation and outgoing longwave radiation, the observed relationship between intraseasonal latent heat flux and precipitation anomalies in regions where intraseasonal variability is strong, and sensitivity experiments performed with a small number of general circulation and idealized models. The authors argue that it would be useful to assess the importance of surface fluxes to intraseasonal variability in a larger number of comprehensive numerical models.