Shallow convection exhibits a large diversity of spatial organizations at the mesoscale. Over the past years, a few prominent patterns of trade-wind clouds have been identified over the tropical western Atlantic. These patterns depend on environmental conditions and exert different radiative impacts. This raises two questions: What are the physical processes underlying changes in the mesoscale...
The trade-wind cumuli are a great source of uncertainty for the future climate as their net radiative effect is hardly represented in the global models. The spatial organization of these clouds, that drives their radiative effect, has been categorized into 4 major patterns: Sugar, Flower, Gravel and Fish. The processes governing their spatial organization and the relationships with the large...
Recent observations revealed that meso-scale patterns of shallow convection in the downwind trades can be connected to specific atmospheric environments whose characteristics are not solely from within the trades but have traces from tropical or mid-latitudinal origin depending on the pattern. As a consequence of this co-variability of patterns and air-mass characteristics, a different...
While radiative transfer through cloud fields is a 3D process, we generally solve this only in 1D due to the high computational costs involved. As a consequence, large-eddy simulations with 1D radiation have highly simplified shortwave heating and longwave cooling in clouds. Also, surface fields of direct radiation have cloud shadows at the wrong location and surface diffuse radiation is too...
