Prof. Gregory P. King, ATTIC Research Associates Selkirk, Scottish Borders, UK

"Correlating extremes in wind divergence with extremes in rain over the Tropical Atlantic"

Abstract: Correlating extremes in wind divergence with extremes in rain over the Tropical Atlantic Air-sea fluxes influence weather and climate and their extremes. Atmospheric moist convective processes can organize individual thunderstorms into large convective systems that generate extremely intense localized thunderstorms, such as one in east Texas last year - see the region in red near the end of this 33-second video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5M7NM93Fw 1M. The objective of our work is to correlate satellite measurements of wind divergence and rain intensity. Our analysis shows that the wind-rain correlation is neither random nor linear. The quantification of the effect took us on a journey that will be described in the seminar. The key to our success was to focus on the extremes.