Level of neutral buoyancy, deep convective outflow, and convective core: New perspectives based on 5 years of CloudSat data Journal of Geophysical Research: Atmospheres

This paper is the follow on to a previous publication by the authors, which investigated the relationship between the level of neutral buoyancy (LNB) determined from the ambient sounding and theactual out flow levels using mainly CloudSat observations. The goal of the current study is to provide a more complete characterization of LNB, deep convective out flow, and convective core, and the relationship among them, as well as the dependence on environmental parameters and convective system size. A proxy isintroduced to estimate convective entrainment, namely, the difference between the LNB (based on the ambient sounding) and the actual out flow height. The principal findings are as follows: (1) Deep convection over the Warm Pool has larger entrainment rates and smaller convective cores than the counterpart overthe two tropical land regions (Africa and Amazonia), lending observational support to a long-standing assumption in convection models concerning the negative relationship between the two parameters. (2) The