The advection-condensation model and water vapour PDFs

Abstract: The statistically steady humidity distribution resulting from an interaction of advection, modeled as an uncorrelated random walk of moist parcels on an isentropic surface, and a vapour sink, modeled as immediate condensation whenever the specific humidity exceeds a specified saturation humidity, is explored with theory and simulation. A source supplies moisture at the deep-tropical southern boundary of the domain, and the saturation humidity is specified as a monotonically decreasing function of distance from the boundary. The boundary source balances the interior condensation sink, so that a stationary spatially inhomogeneous humidity distribution emerges. An exact solution of the Fokker-Planck equation delivers a simple expression for the resulting probability density function (PDF) of the water vapour field and also of the relative humidity. This solution agrees completely with a numerical simulation of the process, and the humidity PDF exhibits several features of interest, such as bimodality close to the source and unimodality further from the source. The PDFs of specific and relative humidity are broad and non-Gaussian. The domain averaged relative humidity PDF is bimodal with distinct moist and dry peaks, a feature which we show agrees with middleworld isentropic PDFs derived from the ERA interim dataset.