Observing the Impact of Convective Aggregation on Water Vapor – GWC Mag

Editors’ Highlights are summaries of recent papers by AGU’s journal editors.

Source: AGU Advances

Convective clouds exist in a variety of forms, from individual cells to larger aggregated systems. Recent modeling studies indicate that the aggregation of convective clouds has a significant influence on atmospheric water vapor. This feature has important implications for climate because humidity variations can modulate the Earth’s radiation budget.

Galewsky et al. [2023] provide observational evidence of how convective aggregation impacts atmospheric humidity. The study was feasible due to two crucial advancements in the field: the capability to quantitatively measure cloud organization from observations and the accessibility of remote sensing measurements for water vapor isotopic composition. Unaggregated convection with top-heavy ascent profiles is shown to moisten and isotopically deplete the atmosphere more than aggregated convection with bottom-heavy ascent profiles. The results have the potential to help interpret paleoclimate archives and evaluate numerical simulations of convection.

Citation: Galewsky, J., Schneider, M., Diekmann, C., Semie, A., Bony, S., Risi, C., et al. (2023). The influence of convective aggregation on the stable isotopic composition of water vapor. AGU Advances, 4, e2023AV000877. https://doi.org/10.1029/2023AV000877

—Sarah Kang, Editor, AGU Advances

Text © 2023. The authors. CC BY-NC-ND 3.0
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