Enhancement of vertical cloud-induced radiative heating in East Asian monsoon circulation derived from CloudSat-CALIPSO observations

ABSTRACT Improving the understanding of cloud–radiation–monsoon interactions is difficult due to the limited knowledge regarding the impacts of vertical cloud radiative forcing on monsoon circulation. Here, we focus on the annual cycle of the vertical structure of cloud-induced radiative heating (CRH) to evaluate further their impacts on the East Asian monsoon circulation (100°–140° E, 20°–45° N) derived from satellite observations and reanalysis datasets. Entire troposphere and lower stratosphere are heated by vertical CRH, with the peak reaching 1 K day−1 at the mid-level troposphere (4–10 km) during summer. Although radiative warming occurs below 3 km from the prevailing stratocumulus, widespread weak radiative cooling (approximately −0.2 K day−1) occurs at a wide vertical range above 3 km during winter. Consequently, the wind vector variations resulting from vertical CRH highly coincide with the monsoon circulation, leading to the increase in wind speeds by 1.8 and 0.5 m s−1 during summer and winter, respectively, while a weakly negative influence (about 0.3 m s−1) occurs at the low-level troposphere below 3 km during winter. Although high clouds, stratiform clouds, and stratocumulus dominate these wind vector variations, deep convective clouds generate the strongest updraft (up to 7 m s−1) amongst all cloud categories despite their low occurrence frequency. Results highlight the important enhancement of vertical CRH to East Asian monsoon circulation by perturbing the vertical structure of heating rate.