From Environmental Moisture to Precipitation in Observations and Simulations of Mesoscale Convective Systems

Morphological properties, collocated synoptic conditions, and collocated rainfall for mesoscale convective systems in 1) the ISCCP Convective Tracking (CT) dataset with coincident data from the ERA-Interim (ERA-I) reanalysis and the Multi-Source Weighted-Ensemble Precipitation (MSWEP) product and 2) long-channel radiative-convective equilibrium (RCE) simulations in the System for Atmospheric Modeling (SAM). ISCCP_tracking_colloc.tar.gz - NetCDF files by year from 1983 to 2008 including ISCCP-CT morphological properties of MCSs, a series of collocated synoptic variables from ERAI (including sea surface temperature, winds, specific humidity profiles, cloud condensate profiles, etc.), and collocated precipitation intensity and accumulation from MSWEP. RCE_colloc_execution1.tar.gz - NetCDF files including RCE-SAM extent of MCSs (RCE_COL_cluster-sizes_*.nc), as well as collocated synoptic variables. Collocation of synoptic variables is performed for these files by extracting and averaging the variables over grid cells where the precipitation is greater than either its mean (RCE_COL_MEAN_*.nc) or its 99th percentile (RCE_COL_99_*.nc). RCE_colloc_execution2.tar.gz - NetCDF files including RCE-SAM extent of MCSs (RCE_COL_cluster-sizes_*.nc), as well as collocated synoptic variables. Collocation of synoptic variables is performed for these files by taking either the mean (RCE_COL_MEAN_*.nc) or the 99th percentile (RCE_COL_99_*.nc) value over all grid cells within the MCS.For the NetCDF files from RCE output, the numeric value in the file name is the corresponding sea surface temperature from 280 to 310 K.