Identification

Title

Self-organized criticality and homeostasis in atmospheric convective organization

Abstract

Atmospheric convection has a tendency to organize on a hierarchy of scales ranging from the mesoscale to the planetary scales, with the latter especially manifested by the Madden-Julian oscillation. The present paper examines two major competing mechanisms of self-organization in a cloud-resolving model (CRM) simulation from a phenomenological thermodynamic point of view. The first mechanism is self-organized criticality. A saturation tendency of precipitation rate with increasing column-integrated water, reminiscent of critical phenomena, indicates self-organized criticality. The second is a self-regulation mechanism that is known as homeostasis in biology. A thermodynamic argument suggests that such self-regulation maintains the column-integrated water below a threshold by increasing the precipitation rate. Previous analyses of both observational data as well as CRM experiments give mixed results. In this study, a CRM experiment over a large-scale domain with a constant sea surface temperature is analyzed. This analysis shows that the relation between the column-integrated total water and precipitation suggests self-organized criticality, whereas the one between the column-integrated water vapor and precipitation suggests homeostasis. The concurrent presence of these two mechanisms is further elaborated by detailed statistical and budget analyses. These statistics are scale invariant, reflecting a spatial scaling of precipitation processes.

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document

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http://n2t.net/ark:/85065/d7hm5986

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eng

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geoscientificInformation

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publication

effective date

2016-01-01T00:00:00Z

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publication

effective date

2012-12-01T00:00:00Z

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Copyright 2012 American Meteorological Society (AMS). Permission to use figures, tables, and brief excerpts from this work in scientific and educational works is hereby granted provided that the source is acknowledged. Any use of material in this work that is determined to be "fair use" under Section 107 or that satisfies the conditions specified in Section 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law (17 USC, as revised by P.L. 94-553) does not require the Society's permission. Republication, systematic reproduction, posting in electronic form on servers, or other uses of this material, except as exempted by the above statements, requires written permission or license from the AMS. Additional details are provided in the AMS Copyright Policies, available from the AMS at 617-227-2425 or amspubs@ametsoc.org. Permission to place a copy of this work on this server has been provided by the AMS. The AMS does not guarantee that the copy provided here is an accurate copy of the published work.

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OpenSky Support

organisation name

UCAR/NCAR - Library

full postal address

PO Box 3000

Boulder

80307-3000

email address

opensky@ucar.edu

web address

http://opensky.ucar.edu/

name: homepage

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pointOfContact

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