Does increasing horizontal resolution improve the simulation of intense tropical rainfall?

We examine tropical rainfall from Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory’s Atmosphere Model version 4 (GFDL AM4) at three horizontal resolutions of 100 km, 50 km, and 25 km. The model produces more intense rainfall at finer resolutions, but a large discrepancy still exists between the simulated and the observed frequency distribution. We use a theoretical precipitation scaling diagnostic to examine the frequency distribution of the simulated rainfall. The scaling accurately produces the frequency distribution at moderate-to-high intensity (≥10 mm day-1). Intense tropical rainfall at finer resolutions is produced primarily from the increased contribution of resolved precipitation and enhanced updrafts. The model becomes more sensitive to the grid-scale updrafts than local thermodynamics at high rain rates as the contribution from the resolved precipitation increases. On the contrary, the observed tropical precipitation extremes do not show a strong sensitivity to the grid-scale updrafts.