Model calculations show that mixing is persistent regardless of the lifetime and spatial dimension of individual cirrus in the cloud ensemble. In fact, it is relatively insensitive to characteristics of individual clouds, as long as these characteristics are typical for cirrus clouds in the atmosphere. Conversely, the amplitude of the large-scale radiative heating asymmetry between cloudy and non-cloudy regions has a large effect on mixing and hence transport timescale. Consequently, the transport timescale does not decrease linearly with increasing time-mean radiative heating in the cloudy region, because the effect of stronger cloud radiative heating (which tends to shorten the transport timescale) is partially compensated by the increase in mixing (which tends to increase the transport timescale).
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