Description of mesoscale pattern formation in shallow convective cloud fields by using time-dependent Ginzburg-Landau and Swift-Hohenberg stochastic equations.

Abstract

The time-dependent Ginzburg-Landau (or Allen-Cahn) equation and the Swift-Hohenberg equation, both added with a stochastic term, are proposed to describe cloud pattern formation and cloud regime phase transitions of shallow convective clouds organized in mesoscale systems. The starting point is the Hottovy-Stechmann linear spatiotemporal stochastic model for tropical precipitation, used to describe the dynamics of water vapor and tropical convection. By taking into account that shallow stratiform clouds are close to a self-organized criticality and that water vapor content is the order parameter, it is observed that sources must have nonlinear terms in the equation to include the dynamical feedback due to precipitation and evaporation. The nonlinear terms are derived by using the known mean field of the Ising model, as the Hottovy-Stechmann linear model presents the same probability distribution. The inclusion of this nonlinearity leads to a kind of time-dependent Ginzburg-Landau stochastic equation, originally used to describe superconductivity phases. By performing numerical simulations, pattern formation is observed. These patterns are better compared with real satellite observations than the pure linear model. This is done by comparing the spatial Fourier transform of real and numerical cloud fields. However, for highly ordered cellular convective phases, considered as a form of Rayleigh-Bénard convection in moist atmospheric air, the Ginzburg-Landau model does not allow us to reproduce such patterns. Therefore, a change in the form of the small-scale flux convergence term in the equation for moist atmospheric air is proposed. This allows us to derive a Swift-Hohenberg equation. In the case of closed cellular and roll convection, the resulting patterns are much more organized than the ones obtained from the Ginzburg-Landau equation and better reproduce satellite observations as, for example, horizontal convective fields.