Thermodynamic Aspects of Precipitation Efficiency

Precipitation efficiency is one of important meteorological parameters and has been widely used in operational precipitation forecasts (e.g., Doswell et al., 1996). Precipitation efficiency has been defined as the ratio of precipitation rate to the sum of all precipitation sources from water vapor budget (e.g., Auer and Marwitz, 1968; Heymsfield and Schotz, 1985; Chong and Hauser, 1989; Dowell et al., 1996; Ferrier et al., 1996; Li et al., 2002; Sui et al., 2005) after Braham (1952) calculated precipitation efficiency with the inflow of water vapor into the storm through cloud base as the rainfall source more than half century ago. Sui et al. (2007) found that the estimate of precipitation efficiency with water vapor process data can be more than 100% or negative because some rainfall sources are excluded or some rainfall sinks are included. They defined precipitation efficiency through the inclusion of all rainfall sources and the exclusion of all rainfall sinks from surface rainfall budget derived by Gao et al. (2005), which fixed precipitation efficiency to the normal range of 0-100%. In additional to water vapor processes, thermal processes also play important roles in the development of rainfall since precipitation is determined by environmental thermodynamic conditions via cloud microphysical processes. The water vapor convergence and heat divergence and its forced vapor condensation and depositions in the precipitation systems could be major sources for precipitation while these water vapor and cloud processes could give some feedback to the environment. Gao et al. (2005) derived a water vapor related surface rainfall budget through the combination of cloud budget with water vapor budget. Gao and Li (2010) derived a thermally related surface rainfall budget through the combination of cloud budget with heat budget. In this chapter, precipitation efficiency is defined from the thermally related surface rainfall budget (PEH) and is calculated using the data from the two-dimensional (2D) cloud-resolving model simulations of a pre-summer torrential rainfall event over southern China in June 2008 (Wang et al., 2010; Shen et al., 2011a, 2011b) and is compared with the precipitation efficiency defined from water vapor related surface rainfall budget (Sui et al., 2007) to study the efficiency in thermodynamic aspect of the pre-summer heavy rainfall system. The impacts of ice clouds on the development of convective systems have been intensively studied through the analysis of cloud-resolving model simulations (e.g., Yoshizaki, 1986;