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Analyses of the thermodynamics of precipitating clouds are mostly based on localized in situ campaigns or, more globally, weather analyses and reanalyses. This work presents a comparison of weather analyses to satellite observations and a radiometeorological method that shows how precipitating layers inside clouds coincide with weather analyses underestimates of the amount of water vapor. The thermodynamic information from inside precipitating clouds is extracted using observed radio occultation (RO) refractivity profiles without requiring weather analysis input, thus reducing analysis-induced biases. The radiometeorological method is described by first identifying the differences between adiabatically dry, mixing-ratio conserving, and saturated pseudoadiabatic refractivity profiles. These reference profiles are then compared to observed RO refractivity profiles within precipitating and nonprecipitating clouds to infer changes in their height-dependent thermodynamic states and in stability to convection. Precipitation is found to start below layers close to pseudoadiabatic and precipitation layers coincide with changes into conditional stability against convection. A statistical comparison between observed profiles and the gradients predicted for a saturated pseudoadiabatic profile is made and finds that on the global average, precipitation separates clouds from the Clausius-Clapeyron law and profiles are close to a saturated pseudoadiabat. The results (a) help constrain the physical processes associated to precipitation inside clouds and (b) validate the potential of graphical RO techniques to analyze observations without ancillary temperature data from weather analyses.

Plain Language Summary Predicting how precipitation responds to changes in atmospheric thermal profiles remains a challenge identified by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Solving this challenge requires comparing models with the observed thermodynamics of precipitating clouds. Only radio occultation (RO) can constraint globally the thermodynamics inside clouds with high vertical resolution. Infrared and microwave can measure the thermodynamics outside and only partially clouds, and radar instruments that measure inside clouds do not provide thermodynamic information.This paper develops a method to use RO for distinguishing the thermodynamics inside precipitating versus nonprecipitating clouds. The identification of rain is made using coincidences of RO soundings with Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission and CloudSat observations. Using the method, we show that globally, (1) the European Center for Medium-Range Weather Forecast ERA Interim reanalysis and the Global Forecast System weather analysis have a global bias in precipitating clouds caused by misrepresentation of the thermodynamics inside clouds; (2) the nature of the bias is associated to a misrepresentation of the lapse rates by the analyses; (3) there are changes in stability to moist convection associated to the height where precipitation originates, and (4) the transition from midtropospheric lapse rates to boundary layer shows more frequent sharp inversions in nonprecipitating than in precipitating scenes.