Description:

Mesoscale organization of shallow and deep convection is a ubiquitous feature of cloud systems with climatic importance for modulating cloud water, precipitation, and top-of-atmosphere and surface radiation. However, our fundamental understanding of what drives pattern formation in clouds and its impact on the strength of cloud feedback and therefore climate sensitivity remains limited. This uncertainty is exacerbated by the potential effects of anthropogenic atmospheric aerosols on modulating cloud organization in conjunction with other meteorological drivers. This session invites observational, theoretical, and numerical modeling studies that expand our understanding of the interactions between cloud organization, meteorology, and aerosol, and their implications for climate. All topics related to shallow cloud organization, deep convective organization (including convective self-aggregation studies), Lagrangian and climatological transitions between shallow cloud organizational structures, and extreme events that are tied to mesoscale convective organization are welcome. We especially welcome innovative perspectives on the role of aerosols in regulating cloud organization, and the reciprocal influence of cloud organization on aerosol-cloud interactions, cloud radiative properties and cloud feedback. We encourage thought-provoking contributions and novel ideas based on satellite observations, large eddy and cloud resolving model simulations, conceptual modeling, theoretical approaches, and recent field campaigns (e.g. ACE-ENA, ACTIVATE, AEROMMA, CAMP2Ex, CAP-MBL, COMBLE, CSET, EPCAPE, EUREC4A/ATOMIC, MAGIC, ORACLES/CLARIFY, OTREC, RELAMPAGO-CACTI, TRACER).