A budget for the size of convective self‐aggregation
Name
budget-size-convective.pdf
Description
Published version
Size
4.22 MB
Format
Adobe PDF
Checksum (MD5)
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Author(s)
Beucler, Tom G.
Cronin, Timothy Wallace
Date Issued
February 2019
Journal
Quarterly Journal of the Royal Meteorological Society
Publisher
Wiley
Citation
Beucler, Tom; Cronin, Timothy. "A budget for the size of convective self‐aggregation." Quarterly Journal of the Royal Meteorological Society 145 (2019): 947– 966. https://doi.org/10.1002/qj.3468
Version
Author's final manuscript
Abstract
There is no consensus on the physical mechanisms controlling the scale at which convective activity organizes near the Equator. Here, we introduce a diagnostic framework relating the evolution of the length‐scale of convective aggregation to the net radiative heating, the surface enthalpy flux, and horizontal energy transport. We evaluate these expansion tendencies of convective aggregation in 20 high‐resolution cloud‐permitting simulations of radiative‐convective equilibrium. While both radiative fluxes contribute to convective aggregation, the net long‐wave radiative flux operates at large scales (1,000–5,000 km) and stretches the size of moist and dry regions, while the net short‐wave flux operates at smaller scales (500–2,000 km) and shrinks it. The surface flux expansion tendency is dominated by convective gustiness, which acts to aggregate convective activity at smaller scales (500–3,000 km).
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Earth, Atmospheric, and Planetary Sciences
Lorenz Center (Massachusetts Institute of Technology)
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Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike
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DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1002/QJ.3468
