The Impact of a Land‐Sea Contrast on Convective Aggregation in Radiative‐Convective Equilibrium

Abstract

In the tropics, deep convection transports large amounts of water vapor and energy vertically, as well as playing an important role in setting the Earth's radiative budget and large-scale circulations. This deep convection can be organized on a range of scales, from mesoscale convective systems, up to planetary envelopes of convection like the Madden-Julian Oscillation (MJO) (Madden & Julian, 1994;Tobin et al., 2012). Organized systems like these provide a significant contribution to tropical precipitation and cloudiness, with a large fraction of precipitation extremes occurring during convective organization (Roca & Fiolleau, 2020). Increased convective clustering has also been shown to affect large-scale circulations, including the structure and extent of the intertropical convergence zone (Popp & Bony, 2019).