22-Year survey of tropical convection penetrating into the lower stratosphere

A 22-year survey of tropical convection penetrating into the stratosphere has been conducted using special subsets of the International Satellite Cloud Climatology Project cloud data set. In addition to refined information about the geographic distribution of penetrating convective systems, these results show that penetrating convection occurs predominantly in the larger, organized, mesoscale convective systems, whereas smaller, unorganized convective systems rarely penetrate. Durations of penetrating events are longest for the largest systems, hurricanes and typhoons, generally exceeding one day.