Moist convection is most vigorous at intermediate atmospheric humidity

TL;DR

This study demonstrates that moist convective vigor in planetary atmospheres peaks at intermediate humidity levels, challenging the notion that it always increases with warming, with implications for Earth's climate and other planets.

Contribution

The paper provides simulation evidence that convective vigor peaks at intermediate humidity, revealing a universal behavior across different planetary atmospheres.

Findings

Convective vigor peaks near T_s ~ 330 K for Earth-like atmospheres.

Peak convective vigor occurs when condensible gas is about 10% by mass at cloud base.

Similar peak observed in Titan-like atmospheres at T_s ~ 95 K.

Abstract

In Earth's current climate, moist convective updraft speeds increase with surface warming. This trend suggests that very vigorous convection might be the norm in extremely hot and humid atmospheres, such as those undergoing a runaway greenhouse transition. However, theoretical and numerical evidence suggests that convection is actually gentle in water vapor-dominated atmospheres, implying that convective vigor may peak at some intermediate humidity level. Here, we perform small-domain convection-resolving simulations of an Earth-like atmosphere over a wide range of surface temperatures and confirm that there is indeed a peak in convective vigor, which we show occurs near T_s ~ 330 K. We show that a similar peak in convective vigor exists when the relative abundance of water vapor is changed by varying the amount of background (non-condensing) gas at fixed T_s, which may have implications for Earth's climate and atmospheric chemistry during the Hadean and Archean. We also show that Titan-like thermodynamics (i.e., a thick nitrogen atmosphere with condensing methane and low gravity) produce a peak in convective vigor at T_s ~ 95 K, which is curiously close to the current surface temperature of Titan. Plotted as functions of the saturation specific humidity at cloud base, metrics of convective vigor from both Earth-like and Titan-like experiments all peak when cloud-base air contains roughly 10% of the condensible gas by mass. Our results point to a potentially common phenomenon in terrestrial atmospheres: that moist convection is most vigorous when the condensible component is between dilute and non-dilute abundance.