Morphological Characteristics of Tropical Precipitation Features Producing Extreme Instantaneous Rain Rates in Observations and a Global Storm-Resolving Model

As global warming may influence convective organization, it is important to observationally constrain the effects of convective organization on the production of extreme instantaneous tropical rain rates. It is also important to evaluate the ability of global storm-resolving models in capturing this coupling. We quantify the spatial morphology of tropical precipitation features that contain extreme tropical rain rates. We compare these morphological measures to the morphology of extreme precipitation features as simulated by a global storm-resolving model. We find that in both observations and the model simulation, precipitation features with extreme rain rates are on average larger and have higher convective area fraction than the average precipitation feature. Further, among precipitation features with a similar amount of total convection, those with spatially concentrated convective cores generated on average more intense maximum precipitation rates. Our evaluated model underestimates the influence of the spatial concentration of convection on maximum rain rate.