Moisture Transport, Lower-Tropospheric Stability, and Decoupling of Cloud-Topped Boundary Layers

Abstract Decoupling during the “Lagrangian” evolution of a cloud-topped boundary layer advected equatorward by the trade winds in an idealized eastern subtropical ocean is studied using a mixed-layer model (MLM). The sea surface temperature is gradually warmed while the free tropospheric sounding remains unchanged, causing the boundary layer to deepen, the surface relative humidity to decrease, and surface latent heat fluxes to increase. Diurnally averaged insolation is used. For entrainment closures in which entrainment rate is related to a large-eddy convective velocity scale w*, the MLM predicts an increasingly prominent layer of negative buoyancy fluxes below cloud base as the sea surface temperature warms. Decoupling of the mixed layer can be inferred when the MLM-predicted negative buoyancy fluxes become too large for the internal circulations to sustain. The authors show that decoupling is mainly driven by an increasing ratio of the surface latent heat flux to the net radiative cooling in the cloud...

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