Characteristic form and distance in high-level hierarchical structure of
self-aggregated clouds in radiative-convective equilibrium
Abstract
The nature of convective organization remains elusive, despite its
importance for understanding the role of clouds in climate systems. This
study reports a new type of large-scale structure formed by the
self-organization of deep moist atmospheric convection in
radiative-convective equilibrium. To understand the natural behavior of
convection unaffected by the computational domain, we conducted
cloud-resolving simulations by systematically increasing the horizontal
domain size to approximately 25,000 km. We found that if the domain side
length exceeded 5,000 km, the domain-averaged thermodynamic fields and
the horizontal characteristic length converged in quasi-equilibrium; the
cloud aggregation area exhibited a mesh-like pattern, analogous to the
shallow convective organizations despite their different scales. Its
characteristic length is estimated to be approximately 3,000–4,000 km.
The results suggest that this length scale is related to the upper-limit
size of mesoscale convective systems or the scale of supercloud clusters
in a real tropical atmosphere.