Seminar

Abstract

The talk will explore the underlying principles of self-organization behind closed- and open-cellular mesoscale cloud structures in cloud fields off the west coast of continents. Early surface observations in the 1930s drew parallels to Rayleigh-Benard convection but it was only with the advent of meteorological satellites that observations of mesoscale cellular organization became commonplace. Similar patterns are evident in a bowl of miso soup. Recent evidence has shown that aerosol particles – through their influence on precipitation formation – help to determine whether cloud fields take on closed or open cellular patterns. I will present results from numerical models, satellite imagery, and lidar to show how precipitating clouds produce an open cellular cloud pattern that oscillates between different, weakly stable states. The cause of these oscillations will be discussed and analogies to other coupled, oscillating and self-organizing systems will be drawn.