Tropical and subtropical latent heating associated with precipitation and its relationship with large-scale environments are studied. Three dimensional apparent heat source minus radiative heating (Q1-QR) data obtained with TRMM Spectral Latent Heating (SLH) algorithm, which evaluates the convective rain heating and the stratiform rain heating separately, are utilized for the analysis. The analysis region is 36N-36S and period is 1998-2007.

There are three characteristic peaks in the average Q1-QR profiles, at ~2km, ~5km, and at ~8km. The former two attribute to the convective rain, while the last one is from the deep stratiform rain. 2km peak corresponds to the warim rain with the rain top height at ~4km and 8km peak well represents the organized deep precipitation. Warm rain heating is significant over oceans but not over land.

We next compare the oceanic warm rain and deep rain heating with the large-scale environmental conditions. As a result, warm rain heating strongly correlates with the sea surface temperature (SST), while deep rain behaves like feeling SST as merely a threshold value. It is indicated that even for the same SST, deep convection is effectively suppressed with a large-scale subsidence represented by dp/dt at 500 hPa. It is quantitatively suggested that a reproduction of realistic large-scale circulation, especially subsidence, is essential for realistic distributions of tropical and subtropical precipitation.