Abstract
There is no consensus on the physical mechanisms controlling the scale
at which convective activity organizes near the Equator, where the
Coriolis parameter is small. High resolution cloud-permitting
simulations of non-rotating convection show the emergence of a dominant
length scale, which has been referred to as convective self-aggregation.
Furthermore, simulations in an elongated domain of size 12228km x 192km
with a 3km horizontal resolution equilibrate to a wave-like pattern in
the elongated direction, where the cluster size becomes independent of
the domain size. These recent findings suggest that the size of
convective aggregation may be regulated by physical mechanisms, rather
than artifacts of the model configuration, and thus within the reach of
physical understanding. 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 length scale tendencies of convective
aggregation in twenty high-resolution cloud-permitting simulations of
radiative-convective equilibrium. While both radiative fluxes contribute
to convective aggregation, the net longwave radiative flux operates at
large scales (1000-5000 km) and stretches the size of moist and dry
regions, while the net shortwave flux operates at smaller scales
(500-2000 km) and shrinks it. The surface flux length scale tendency is
dominated by convective gustiness, which acts to aggregate convective
activity at smaller scales (500-3000 km). We further investigate the
scale-by-scale radiative tendencies in a suite of nine mechanism denial
experiments, in which different aspects of cloud radiation are
homogenized or removed across the horizontal domain, and find that
liquid and ice cloud radiation can individually aggregate convection.
However, only ice cloud radiation can drive the convective cluster to
scales exceeding 5000 km, because of the high optical thickness of ice,
and the increase in coherence between water vapor and deep convection
with horizontal scale. The framework presented here focuses on the
length scale tendencies rather than a static aggregated state, which is
a step towards diagnosing clustering feedbacks in the real world.
Overall, our work underscores the need to observe and simulate surface
fluxes, radiative and advective fluxes across the 1km-1000km range of
scales to better understand the characteristics of turbulent moist
convection.