Scaling in stratocumulus fields: an emergent property

Abstract

Marine stratocumulus clouds play a critical role in the Earth's climate system. They display an amazing array of complex behaviors at many different spatiotemporal scales. Precipitation in these clouds is in general very light, but it is vital for clouds' systematic evolution and organization. Here we identify areas of high liquid water path within these clouds as potentially precipitating, or pouches. They are breeding grounds for stratocumuli to change their organization form. We show, using different satellite data sets, that the size distribution of these pouches show a universal scaling. We argue that such scaling is an emergent property of the cloud system, which results from numbers interactions at the microscopic scale.