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- A12H-05: Tropical Moist Heat Extremes on Small Scales Are Not Well Constrained by Reanalysis-Derived Quasi-Equilibrium Relationships
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Board 2146‚ New Orleans Theater ANOLA CC
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Quinn Bowman, University of Wisconsin Madison (First Author, Presenting Author)
Larissa Back, UW-Madison
As Earth’s climate warms, it becomes harder for humans to stay cool and maintain safe body temperatures. If air temperature exceeds body temperature, cooling by evaporation, such as sweating, is the only way that humans can cool. A measure of heat that accounts for the ability to cool by evaporation is “moist heat” and it is commonly expressed as the wet-bulb temperature. In models, the most extreme tropical moist heat is controlled by atmospheric dynamics: the small horizontal temperature variations in the middle of the tropical atmosphere, and the threshold for maximum vertical convective instability. However, models do not reproduce the observed extreme moist heat on small scales because models calculate values as an average in space and time. As such, we are interested in how observations of moist heat compare with models, and whether they are consistent in the convective stability framework. We find that weather stations have higher moist heat than would be expected by the stability framework. We hypothesize that the assumptions used to calculate the threshold for maximum instability do not hold on small scales. This suggests that the stability framework in models will underestimate moist heat on small, but human relevant scales.
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