Shallow tropical convection: How often does it rain
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Observations from instruments on two NASA satellites, the precipitation radar (PR) onboard the TRMM satellite and the lidar (GLAS) onboard ICESat, are used to describe the Tropics-wide distribution of precipitating and nonprecipitating shallow convection. Tropics-wide observations from 29 September-18 November 2003 are composited and compared. TRMM PR observations show that shallow precipitating clouds rarely occur over land, but are fairly ubiquitous across the tropical oceans. The ICESat lidar shows that shallow convective clouds occur infrequently over land and are most common in the trade-wind regions.