Distribution of Tropical Deep Convective Clouds From Megha-Tropiques SAPHIR Data

A method has been developed to delineate tropical deep convective clouds with different vertical extents, making use of five humidity sounding channels of the Sondeur Atmosphérique du Profil d'Humidité Intertropical par Radiométrie payload aboard the Megha-Tropiques (MT) satellite. The methodology is validated by comparing with CloudSat radar and very high resolution radiometer/Kalpana-1 measurements of deep convective and overshooting cloud systems. This methodology is utilized to study deep convective clouds with different vertical extents and examined the seasonality over an India-centered domain. The MT satellite has a low inclination orbit, which ensures the frequent sampling of the global tropical region. The methodology is useful to derive the climatology of occurrence frequency of tropical deep convective clouds with different vertical extents, unbiased to specific local times, with high spatial and temporal resolutions.