A New Organization Metric for Synoptic Scale Tropical Convective Aggregation

Organization metrics were originally developed to measure how densely convective clouds are arranged at mesoscales. In this work, we apply organization describe tropical synoptic scale activity. Such activity is identified by cloud-precipitation (hybrid) regimes defined 1-degree and 1-hourly resolution. Existing found perform inadequately for such regime aggregates because the large domain size co-existence of sparse aggregate occurrences with noisy isolated convection often violate assumptions inherent in these metrics. order capture characteristics, study existing “convective potential” (COP) metric was modified so as focus on local provide increased weight size. The resulting “area-based COP” (ABCOP) follows principle that more numerous objects, higher chance organization. It thus optimized large-scale events occurring during phenomena ENSO MJO, while also performs well small sizes.