Journal article
The impact of a land-sea contrast on convective aggregation in radiative-convective equilibrium
- Abstract:
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Convective aggregation is an important atmospheric phenomenon which frequently occurs in idealized models in radiative-convective equilibrium (RCE), where the effects of land, rotation, sea surface temperature gradients, and the diurnal cycle are often removed. This aggregation is often triggered and maintained by self-generated radiatively driven circulations, for which longwave feedbacks are essential. Many questions remain over how important the driving processes of aggregation in idealized models are in the real atmosphere. We approach this question by adding a continentally sized, idealized tropical rainforest island into an RCE model to investigate how land-sea contrasts impact convective aggregation and its mechanisms. We show that convection preferentially forms over the island persistently in our simulation. This is forced by a large-scale, thermally driven circulation. First, a sea-breeze circulation is triggered by the land-sea thermal contrast, driven by surface sensible heating. This sea-breeze circulation triggers convection which then generates longwave heating anomalies. Through mechanism denial tests we find that removing the longwave feedbacks reduces the large-scale effects of aggregation but does not prevent aggregation from occurring, and thus we highlight there must be another process aiding the aggregation of convection. We also show, by varying the island size, that the aggregated convective cluster appears to have a maximum spatial extent of O(10,000 km). These results highlight that the mechanisms of idealized aggregation remain relevant when land is included in the model, and therefore these mechanisms could help us understand convective organization in the real world.
- Publication status:
- Published
- Peer review status:
- Peer reviewed
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- Files:
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(Preview, Version of record, pdf, 6.5MB, Terms of use)
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- Publisher copy:
- 10.1029/2022ms003249
Authors
- Publisher:
- Wiley
- Journal:
- Journal of Advances in Modeling Earth Systems More from this journal
- Volume:
- 15
- Issue:
- 4
- Article number:
- e2022MS003249
- Publication date:
- 2023-04-07
- Acceptance date:
- 2023-03-24
- DOI:
- EISSN:
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1942-2466
- Language:
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English
- Keywords:
- Pubs id:
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1336856
- Local pid:
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pubs:1336856
- Deposit date:
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2023-04-10
- ARK identifier:
Terms of use
- Copyright holder:
- Dingley et al.
- Copyright date:
- 2023
- Rights statement:
- © 2023 The Authors. Journal of Advances in Modeling Earth Systems published by Wiley Periodicals LLC on behalf of American Geophysical Union. This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
- Licence:
- CC Attribution (CC BY)
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