The tendency for deep tropical convection to aggregate in the absence of any obvious external influences represents an important unsolved problem in the atmospheric sciences. Self-aggregation may serve as a precursor to cyclogenesis, and therefore may be important to the early stages of some hurricanes. The Madden-Julian Oscillation, which represents a prominent but elusive problem in terms of prediction, may also be a manifestation of convective self-aggregation. The goal of the proposed research is to utilize a cloud resolving model to investigate the phenomenon of self-aggregation in tropical convection. The investigators will utilize a novel strategy which exploits the analogy between self-aggregation in large domains and multiple equilibria in limited domain simulations.
Understanding the underlying mechanisms which control self-aggregation would constitute a major achievement and could greatly improve the ability of large scale models to represent interaction processes between convection and large-scale tropical flows. Thus this effort has significant broader impacts. In addition to undergraduate and graduate student training, there is a work plan through which the PI will help educate K-12 teachers on climate-related issues.
