Convective clustering, the spatial organization of tropical deep convection, can manifest itself in two ways: through a decrease in the total area covered by convection and/or through a decrease in the number of convective areas. Much of our current understanding of convective clustering comes from simulations in idealized radiative convective equilibrium (RCE) configurations. In these simulations the two forms of convective clustering tend to covary, and their individual effects on the climate are thus hard to disentangle. This study shows that in aquaplanet simulations with more realistic boundary conditions, such as meridional gradients of surface temperature and rotational forces, the two aspects of convective clustering are not equivalent and are associated with different impacts on the large‐scale climate. For instance, reducing the convective area in the equatorial region in the aquaplanet simulations results in broader meridional humidity and rain distributions and in lower tropospheric temperatures throughout the tropics. By contrast, the number of convective regions primarily impacts the zonal variance of humidity‐related quantities in the aquaplanet simulations, as the distribution of convective regions affects the size of the subsidence regions and thereby the moistening influence of convective regions. The aquaplanet simulations confirm many other qualitative results from RCE simulations, such as a reduction of equatorial tropospheric humidity when the area covered by convection diminishes.

中文翻译：

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水行星模拟中对流集群与平均热带气候之间的关系


对流聚集，即热带深对流的空间组织，可以通过两种方式表现出来：对流覆盖的总面积减少和/或对流区域数量减少。我们目前对对流聚集的大部分理解来自于理想化辐射对流平衡（RCE）配置的模拟。在这些模拟中，两种形式的对流聚集倾向于共变，因此很难区分它们对气候的单独影响。这项研究表明，在具有更真实边界条件（例如表面温度和旋转力的经向梯度）的水生行星模拟中，对流聚集的两个方面并不等同，并且与对大尺度气候的不同影响相关。例如，在水行星模拟中减少赤道地区的对流面积会导致经向湿度和降雨分布更广泛，以及整个热带地区的对流层温度更低。相比之下，对流区域的数量主要影响水行星模拟中湿度相关量的地带方差，因为对流区域的分布影响沉降区域的大小，从而影响对流区域的湿润影响。水行星模拟证实了 RCE 模拟的许多其他定性结果，例如当对流覆盖的区域减少时，赤道对流层湿度会减少。