The Diurnal Cycle in the Tropics

Abstract

A global archive of high-resolution (3-hourly, 0.5 latitude-longitude grid) window (11-12 m) brightness temperature (T b ) data from multiple satellites is being developed by the European Union Cloud Archive User Service (CLAUS) project. It has been used to construct a climatology of the diurnal cycle in convection, cloudiness, and surface temperature for all regions of the Tropics. An example of the application of the climatology to the evaluation of the climate version of the U.K. Met. Office Unified Model (UM), version HadAM3, is presented.