Marine boundary layer stratocumulus clouds tend to occur in two distinct organizational states: the closed cell, high cloud fraction state and the open-cell, low cloud fraction state. The selection of the state is determined by the amount of precipitation, which is in turn strongly influenced by the aerosol concentration. Natural and anthropogenic aerosol perturbations have characteristic...
In radiative-convective equilibrium simulations, convective self-aggregation (CSA) is the spontaneous organization into segregated cloudy and cloud-free regions. Evidence exists for how CSA is stabilized, but how it arises favorably on large domains is not settled. Using large-eddy simulations, we link the spatial organization emerging from the interaction of cold pools (CPs) to CSA. We...
Many mesoscale patterns in trade-wind cloud fields appear to result from the self-organisation of sub-mesoscale cumulus convection. To advance our understanding of these self-organising processes and the role they play in regulating radiation from the trades to space, we have run an ensemble of idealised large-eddy simulations on domains larger than 100 km using the DALES model. Each...
