Colloquium

The Tropical Tropopause Layer (TTL) is a transition region in which the air typically has mixed stratospheric and tropospheric properties. These properties are determined by a combination of large-scale and convective processes. Elucidating these processes has motivated a substantial amount of research in recent years. Convection in the tropics plays a key role in redistributing trace gases and aerosols in the upper troposphere – lower stratosphere region, and the interaction between cloud dynamics, radiation and microphysics is of basic importance in these processes. The global scale models used to for weather prediction and climate simulation typically have spatial and temporal resolutions that limit their ability to properly represent many of these processes. Cloud resolving models (CRMs) can be used to better understand different processes and their interactions. This presentation will provide an overview of recent work on the TTL and the role of deep convection in determining its properties, including some of recent results on statistical features of overshooting convection in the TTL deduced from experiments with a cloud resolving model.