2022/12/11 by Ziwei Wang, E. J. Moyer, Wang, Ziwei +1
Earth and Planetary Sciences · Environmental Science · #Atmospheric and Environmental Gas Dynamics #Atmospheric and Oceanic Physics (physics.ao-ph) #Climate variability and models #FOS: Physical sciences #Meteorological Phenomena and Simulations
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2212.05548
openalex publication_date 2022/12/11 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
Convective available potential energy (CAPE), a metric associated with severe weather, is expected to increase with warming. Under the most widely-accepted theory, developed for strongly convective regimes, mean CAPE should rise following the Clausius-Clapeyron (C-C) relationship at 6-7%/K. We show here that although the magnitude of CAPE change in high-resolution model output is only slightly underestimated with simple theories, it is insufficient to describe the distributional changes, which has a down-sloping structure and is crucial for impact assessment. A more appropriate framework for understanding CAPE changes uses the tight correlation between CAPE and moist static energy (MSE) surplus. Atmospheric profiles develop appreciable CAPE only when MSE surplus becomes positive; beyond this point, CAPE increases as ∼25% of the rise in MSE surplus. Because this relationship is robust across climate states, changes in future CAPE distributions can be well-captured by a simple scaling of present-day data using only three parameters.