Shallow Convective Heating in Weak Temperature Gradient Balance Explains Mesoscale Vertical Motions in the Trades

Earth's climate sensitivity depends on how shallow clouds in the trades respond to changes in the large-scale tropical circulation with warming. In canonical theory for this cloud-circulation coupling, it is assumed that the clouds are controlled by the field of vertical motion on horizontal scales larger than the convection's depth (~1 km). This assumption has been challenged both by recent in situ observations, and idealized large-eddy simulations (LESs). Here, we therefore bring together the recent observations, new analysis from satellite data, and a 40-day, large-domain (1600 x 900 km2) LES of the North Atlantic from the 2020 EUREC4A field campaign, to study the interaction between shallow convection and vertical motions on scales between 10 and 1,000 km (mesoscales), in settings that are as realistic as possible. Across all data sets, the shallow mesoscale vertical motions are consistently represented, ubiquitous, frequently organized into circulations, and formed without imprinting themselves on the mesoscale buoyancy field. Therefore, we use the weak-temperature gradient approximation to show that between at least 12.5–400 km scales, the vertical motion balances heating fluctuations in groups of precipitating shallow cumuli. That is, across the mesoscales, shallow convection controls the vertical motion in the trades, and does not simply adjust to it. In turn, the mesoscale convective heating patterns appear to consistently grow through moisture-convection feedback. Therefore, to represent and understand the cloud-circulation coupling of trade cumuli, the full range of scales between the synoptics and the hectometer must be included in our conceptual and numerical models.