Overshooting convection in tropical cyclones

Using infrared satellite imagery, best‐track data, and reanalysis data, tropical cyclones are shown to contain a disproportionate amount of the deepest convection in the tropics. Although tropical cyclones account for only 7% of the deep convection in the tropics, they account for about 15% of the deep convection with cloud‐top temperatures below the monthly averaged tropopause temperature and 29% of the clouds that attain a cloud‐top temperature 15 K below the temperature of the tropopause. This suggests that tropical cyclones could play an important role in setting the humidity of the stratosphere.