Comparison of Convective and Stratiform Precipitation Properties in Developing and Nondeveloping Tropical Disturbances Observed by the Global Precipitation Measurement over the Western North Pacific

The tropical oceans spawn hundreds of tropical disturbances during the tropical cyclone (TC) peak season every year, but only a small fraction eventually develop into TCs. In this study, using observations from the Global Precipitation Measurement (GPM) satellite, tropical disturbances over the western North Pacific (WNP) from July to October during 2014-2016 are categorized into developing and nondeveloping groups to investigate the differences between satellite-retrieved convective and stratiform precipitation properties in both the inner-core (within 200 km of the disturbance center) and outer-core (within 200-400 km of the disturbance center) regions. The developing disturbances experience a remarkably more oscillatory process in the inner-core region than in the outer-core region. The large areal coverage of strong rainfall in the inner-core region of the disturbance breaks into scattered remnants and then reorganizes and strengthens near the disturbance center again. Contrarily, the precipitation characteristics in the nondeveloping group evolve more smoothly. It can be summarized that disturbances prone to developing into a TC over the WNP satisfy two essential preconditions in terms of precipitation characteristics. First, a large fraction of stratifonn precipitation covers the region that is within 400 km from the disturbance center. The mean vertically integrated unconditional latent heating rate of stratiform and convective precipitation in the developing group above 5.5 km is 6.6 K h(-1) and 2.4 K h(-1), respectively; thus, the stratiform rainfall makes a major contribution to the warming of the upper troposphere. Second, strong convective precipitation occurs within the inner-core region. Compared with stratiform precipitation, which plays a critical role in wanning the mid-to-upper levels, the most striking feature of convective precipitation is that it heats the mid-to-lower troposphere. Overall, the formation of TCs evolving from parent disturbances can be regarded as an outcome of the joint contribution from the two distinct types (convective and stratifonn) of precipitation clouds.