Data from recent field programs studying deep convection may be useful in constraining cumulus parameterizations. To this end, gridded dropsonde analyses are made using data from the OTREC (Organization of Tropical East Pacific Convection) and PREDICT (PreDepression Investigation of Cloud‐Systems in the Tropics) projects to characterize the mesoscale properties of tropical oceanic convection in terms of selected thermodynamic parameters computable from the explicit grids of large‐scale models. In particular, saturation fraction, lower tropospheric moist convective instability, and convective inhibition appear to govern column‐integrated moisture convergence, while sea surface temperature is related to the top‐heaviness of mass flux profiles and the integrated entropy divergence. Local (as opposed to global) surface heat and moisture fluxes and convective available potential energy correlate weakly with these quantities. Recommendations to improve cumulus parameterizations are enumerated.

中文翻译：

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OTREC和PREDICT中对流的新兴特性

来自最近研究深对流的现场程序的数据可能在约束积云参数化方面很有用。为此，利用来自OTREC（热带东太平洋对流组织）和PREDICT（热带云系统的低压前调查）项目的数据进行网格探空分析，以根据选定的热力学来表征热带海洋对流的中尺度特性。可从大型模型的显式网格计算的参数。特别是，饱和度分数，对流层较低的对流湿润不稳定性和对流抑制似乎决定了柱积分水汽的收敛，而海面温度与质量通量剖面的顶重和积分熵的发散有关。局部（而不是全局）地表热和湿通量以及对流可用势能与这些量之间的相关性很弱。列举了改进累积参数化的建议。