Glacial cooling in the tropics: Exploring the roles of tropospheric water vapor, surface wind speed, and boundary layer processes

This paper is a modeling study of possible roles for tropospheric water vapor, surface wind speed, and boundary layer processes in glacial cooling in the Tropics. The authors divide the Tropics into a region of persistent deep convection and a subtropical region with no deep convection. The regions are coupled via a radiatively driven Hadley cell and a wind-driven meridional overturning cell in the ocean. Radiation and the convective boundary layer (CBL) are treated in some detail.