Conveners
Criticality and Symmetry Breaking: Introduction
- Steven Boeing (University of Leeds)
Criticality and Symmetry Breaking: Linking to Atmospheric Convection
- Ronald Dickman (UFMG)
Power-law distributions in nature pose a challenge for statistical physics. The paradigm of self-organized criticality (SOC), introduced by Per Bak and coworkers [1], might resolve this puzzle. SOC shows how scale-free event-size and duration distributions can arise in the apparent absence of tuning parameters, in a system of many interacting entities, each having a threshold for relaxation,...
We have constructed an extension of the Rayleigh–Bénard model of convection, to include latent heating due to the condensation of water vapour in clouds. Condensation occurs whenever specific humidity exceeds saturation (a nonlinear function derived from the Clausius-Clapeyron relation), and leads to heating. Condensed water is removed from the system and hence there is no evaporation. The...
Convective organization at mesoscales (hundreds of kilometres) is ubiquitous in the tropics, but the physical processes behind it are still poorly understood, despite its strong societal and climatic impact. Organization can be forced by the large scales, such as surface temperature gradients. But convective organization can also arise from internal feedbacks, such as "self-aggregation"...
While the mechanism of mesoscale organisation of precipitating deep convection via the creation of cold pools is at least qualitatively well understood, the driving physical mechanisms behind the different mesoscale organisation modes of shallow convection are much less clear.
In this presentation different mechanisms for the formation and detection of organised shallow convection will be discussed.
The DYAMOND (DYnamics of the Atmospheric general circulation Modeled On Non-hydrostatic Domains) project produced simulations of forty days, beginning 1 August 2016, using global models with a cloud-system resolving grid spacing of 5 km or less. How might we use this set of simulations to learn more about the effects of cold pools on convection?
We have developed a global (tropical ocean)...
