Mesoscale Organization of Precipitating Trade-Cumulus Fields
P. Alinaghi (TU Delft - Atmospheric Remote Sensing)
A. Pier Siebesma – Promotor (TU Delft - Geoscience and Remote Sensing)
F. Glassmeier – Copromotor (TU Delft - Atmospheric Remote Sensing)
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Abstract
Shallow cumulus clouds in the trade-wind regions are the most abundant cloud type on Earth and play a crucial role in regulating the planet’s energy balance by reflecting incoming solar radiation back to space. Despite their importance, trade cumuli remain a major source of uncertainty in climate projections. This is largely because climate models struggle to represent the processes shaping these clouds—processes that span a wide range of spatial and temporal scales. One key gap lies in the mesoscale organization of trade cumuli (hundreds of kilometers), where clouds spontaneously form striking, coherent patterns—features that are typically unresolved in climate models. The relevance of this mesoscale structure to low-cloud radiative feedbacks remains essentially unknown. This thesis aims to improve our understanding of the mesoscale organization of trade-wind cumulus cloud fields, with a focus on self-organization—the spontaneous emergence of structures not driven by large-scale or microphysical cloud-controlling factors (CCFs), but by interactions within the system itself (e.g., between clouds).....
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