Performance of an Analytical Model of Convective System Areal Growth and Decay Rates

Stratiform anvil areas strongly impact radiation, and thus, accurately simulating them as a function of their convective core properties is important for constraining cloud feedbacks. In this presentation, using a new analytical model of stratiform anvil area connected to convective latent heating (constrained by ARM observations, WRF simulations, and satellite data), we test the analytical model performance on large eddy simulation (LES) output. We additionally assess the extent to which the simple model is applicable to tropical mesoscale convective systems (MCSs) anvil areas in general. The overarching goal is to arrive at a simple model jointly informed by combining satellite, ground based observations, and MCS simulations that is both useful for understanding stratiform area changes in different (and potentially trending) environments, as well as a model implementable as a climate model convective parameterization component since the full spectrum of anvil area sizes (relative to current ESM grid box sizes) requires the use of cloud parameterizations in CMIP-grade models for CMIP7 (and likely onward).