MSc project suggestions

Organized thunderstorm clusters are responsible for the majority of tropical rainfall and are associated with extreme rainfall events. Recent idealized high-resolution simulations of mesoscale convective systems suggest that under conditions typical of continental regions, such as tropical Africa, the diurnal cycle causes mesoscale clusters of thunderstorms to emerge. Under oceanic conditions, where surface temperatures are approximately constant, the simulations do not show such strong clustering of thunderstorms (Jensen et al., JAMES, 2022). In addition, over the course of many days, a type of hysteresis effect appears, where large patches remain persistently dry and no longer produce rainfall - a type of hysteresis effect. Recent work brings forward a spatially-interacting "toy model" which can describe such organization. The current MSc project extends on this work to incorporate the effect of wind shear, by which the atmosphere is advected horizontally across a tropical land surface.

Theory exists for the linearized shallow water equations on an equatorial beta plane which describes families of wave-like solutions, such as equatorial Kelvin, Rossby and gravity waves (see this review by Kiladis et al.). Yet, the coupling to deep convective clusters is insufficiently explored. Here we build simplified models that mimic such coupling by allowing for equatorial waves to be triggered by deep convection and vice versa the waves - which encode areas of convergence and divergence - to induce mesoscale clusters of deep convection.