Response of the Vertical Structure of Radiative-Convective Equilibrium to Sea Surface Temperatures

How will a changing climate impact profiles of convective heating and radiative cooling, and what effect will these changes have on the energy balance of the atmosphere? How will the processes that control convective outflow change with a changing climate, and how they can influence the global circulation? These questions are investigated in a simplified framework using output from the Super-Parameterized CAM configured to simulate radiative-convective equilibrium. We show how the vertical structures of radiative cooling, convective heating, convective mass flux, and large-scale vertical motion jointly vary in global simulations of RCE over a range of sea surface temperatures.