Contrasting the Co-variability of Daytime Cloud and Precipitation over Tropical Land and Ocean
Abstract. The co-variability of cloud and precipitation in the extended tropics (35° N–35° S) is investigated using contemporaneous datasets for a 13-year period. The goal is to quantify the relationship between cloud types and precipitation events of particular strength. Particular attention is paid to whether the relationship exhibits different characteristics over tropical land and ocean. A major analysis metric is correlation coefficients between fractions of individual cloud types and frequencies within precipitation histogram bins that have been matched in time and space. The cloud type fractions are derived from Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) joint histograms of cloud top pressure and cloud optical thickness in one-degree grid cells, and the precipitation frequencies come from the Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission (TRMM) Multi-satellite Precipitation Analysis (TMPA) dataset aggregated to the same grid. It is found that the strongest coupling (positive correlation) between clouds and precipitation occurs for cumulonimbus clouds and heaviest rainfall over ocean. While the same cloud type and rainfall bin are also best correlated over land compared to other combinations, the correlation magnitude over land is weaker than over ocean. The difference is attributed to the greater size of convective systems over ocean. It is also found both over ocean and land that the anti-correlation of strong precipitation with weak (i.e., thin and/or low) cloud types is of greater absolute strength than positive correlations between weak cloud types and weak precipitation. Cloud type co-occurrence relationships explain some of the cloud-precipitation anti-correlations. Couplings between weaker rainfall and clouds are also distinct in ocean vs. land, with precipitation predictability when cloud type is known being quite poor in general, particularly over land.