Critical Roles of the Stratiform Rainfall in Sustaining the Madden-Julian Oscillation: GCM Experiments

This study assesses the impact of stratiform rainfall (i.e., large-scale rainfall) in the development and maintenance of the Madden-Julian oscillation (MJO) in a contemporary general circulation model: ECHAM4 AGCM and its coupled version. To examine how the model MJO would change as the stratiform proportion (the ratio of the stratiform versus total rainfall) varies, a suite of sensitivity experiments has been carried out under a weather forecast setting and with three 20-yr free integrations. In these experiments, the detrainment rates of deep/shallow convections that function as a water supply to stratiform clouds were modified, which results in significant changes of stratiform rainfall. Both the forecast experiments and long-term free integrations indicate that only when the model produces a significant proportion (>= 30%) of stratiform rainfall can a robust MJO be sustained. When the stratiform rainfall proportion becomes small, the tropical rainfall in the model is dominated by drizzle-like regimes with neither eastward-propagating nor northward-propagating MJO being sustained. It is found that the latent heat release of stratiform rainfall significantly warms up the upper troposphere. The covariability between the heating and positive temperature anomaly produces eddy available potential energy that sustains the MJO against dissipation and also allows the direct interaction between the precipitation heating and large-scale low-frequency circulations, which is critical to the development and maintenance of the MJO. This finding calls for better representations of stratiform rainfall and its connections with the convective component in GCMs in order to improve their simulations of the MJO.