Structural characteristics of deep convective systems over tropical Africa and the Atlantic Ocean

Abstract

A cluster at a given brightness temperature threshold is defined as the area covered by adjacent cloud cells with brightness temperature lower than the threshold. The clusters are classified according to the area they cover and the position of their center of mass. Results show that the convective cluster number can be approximated by a power law of the radius with an exponent around -2. This gives a nearly equal contribution of each cluster size to the mean high cloud cover for a given brightness temperature threshold. Using the visible channel (0.4-1.1μm) of Meteosat, we show that the part of the clusters with reflectance larger than 0.7 also follows a power law. -from Authors