Mesoscale patterns of trade-wind clouds: dependence on environmental conditions and influence on cloud properties
Abstract
Warm boundary layer clouds can exhibit a wide diversity of spatial organizations. How do cloud patterns depend on their environment? How do they affect the radiation budget? Do they relate to microphysical and macropysical cloud properties? We will address these questions by focusing on the spatial patterns of marine low clouds over warm tropical oceans. In the trade-wind regions, satellite imagery shows that shallow cumuli exhibit prominent patterns of organization. By analyzing their daily and interannual variabilities with satellite observations and meteorological reanalyses, we will show that the cloud patterns primarily depend on surface wind speed and lower-tropospheric stability, and that they are associated with different radiative effects. Then, we will explore the relationships between these different patterns and the shallow cloud properties by analyzing airborne data from the recent EUREC4A field campaign. This campaign, which took place in Jan-Feb 2020 off the Eastern coast of Barbados, offered the opportunity to examine the large-scale dynamical and thermodynamical controls of cloud organizations, as well as the microphysical and macrophysical properties of the clouds embedded in the mesoscale patterns. Early results from the campaign will be presented.
- Publication:
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AGU Fall Meeting Abstracts
- Pub Date:
- December 2020
- Bibcode:
- 2020AGUFMA127...04B
- Keywords:
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- 3307 Boundary layer processes;
- ATMOSPHERIC PROCESSES;
- 3311 Clouds and aerosols;
- ATMOSPHERIC PROCESSES;
- 3323 Large eddy simulation;
- ATMOSPHERIC PROCESSES;
- 3365 Subgrid-scale (SGS) parameterization;
- ATMOSPHERIC PROCESSES