A simple method for detecting the lifecycle of deep moist convection from discretized data

Deep moist convection plays a crucial role in transporting energy and momentum in the Earth’s atmosphere. Examining the convection is fundamentally important for better understanding of various atmospheric phenomena, e.g., typhoons, as well as the convection itself. We developed a simple methodology for detecting the lifecycle of convection from discrete spatiotemporal data such as output of model simulations or reanalyses, which are often used in the Atmospheric Science research. The method includes only a few thresholds and hence it can be applied to data of global atmosphere in which environmental conditions for the convection are largely different in space and time. We tested and verified the method on a global simulation with high spatiotemporal resolution.