Convection and Clouds under Different Planetary Gravities Simulated by a Small-domain Cloud-resolving Model

Abstract

In this study, we employ a cloud-resolving model to investigate how gravity influences convection and clouds in a small-domain (96 × 96 km) radiative–convective equilibrium. Our experiments are performed with a horizontal grid spacing of 1 km, which can resolve large (>1 km2) convective cells. We find that under a given stellar flux, sea surface temperature increases with decreasing gravity. This is because a lower-gravity planet has larger water vapor content and more clouds, resulting in a larger clear-sky greenhouse effect and a stronger cloud warming effect in the small domain. By increasing stellar flux under different gravity values, we find that the convection shifts from a quasi-steady state to an oscillatory state. In the oscillatory state, there are convection cycles with a period of several days, comprised of a short wet phase with intense surface precipitation and a dry phase with no surface precipitation. When convection shifts to the oscillatory state, the water vapor content and high-level cloud fraction increase substantially, resulting in rapid warming. After the transition to the oscillatory state, the cloud net positive radiative effect decreases with increasing stellar flux, which indicates a stabilizing climate effect. In the quasi-steady state, the atmospheric absorption features of CO2 are more detectable on lower-gravity planets because of their larger atmospheric heights. While in the oscillatory state, the high-level clouds mute almost all of the absorption features, making the atmospheric components hard to characterize.