Tropical climate described as a distribution of weather states indicated by distinct mesoscale cloud property mixtures

摘要: [1] An analysis approach that uses the patterns of cloud property joint distributions at mesoscale (cloud type mixtures) from International Satellite Cloud Climatology Project to identify distinct weather states tropical atmosphere is extended whole tropics covering period 1983–2004. These can be used as basis for multi-scale, multi-variate compositing other observations understand how systems affect atmospheric diabatic heating and interact with large scale circulation. We illustrate variations climate on longer time scales described in terms changes frequency occurrence these their associated relationships.