Variability of Midtropospheric Moisture and Its Effect on Cloud-Top Height Distribution during TOGA COARE*

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Abstract
The tropical western Pacific warm pool is often generalized to be a region of heavy precipitation. This conceptis useful in constructing simplified models of the tropical circulation. However, the warm pool region is oftenpunctuated by periods of little rain. Such drought periods may last up to 10 days over an area of at least 6 ×105 km2. Other common features of the drought periods include an extremely dry midtroposphere, few deepclouds typically associated with mesoscale convective systems, and a substantial amount of clouds that are tootall to be categorized as trade cumuli but too short to fall into the category of deep convective clouds. Midtropospheric moisture varies substantially (60% in relative humidity, 4 g kg−1 in water vapor mixing ratio) betweenrainy and drought periods. The frequency distributions of humidity exhibit bimodal structures at certain levelsabove the freezing level. In either rainy or drought periods, or in a long period including both, the time-meanhumidity above the b... Abstract The tropical western Pacific warm pool is often generalized to be a region of heavy precipitation. This conceptis useful in constructing simplified models of the tropical circulation. However, the warm pool region is oftenpunctuated by periods of little rain. Such drought periods may last up to 10 days over an area of at least 6 ×105 km2. Other common features of the drought periods include an extremely dry midtroposphere, few deepclouds typically associated with mesoscale convective systems, and a substantial amount of clouds that are tootall to be categorized as trade cumuli but too short to fall into the category of deep convective clouds. Midtropospheric moisture varies substantially (60% in relative humidity, 4 g kg−1 in water vapor mixing ratio) betweenrainy and drought periods. The frequency distributions of humidity exhibit bimodal structures at certain levelsabove the freezing level. In either rainy or drought periods, or in a long period including both, the time-meanhumidity above the b...

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