Critical phenomena in atmospheric precipitation

By Ole Peters, J. David Neelin. 2006

344 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Critical phenomena occur near continuous phase transitions. As a tuning parameter crosses its critical value, an order parameter increases as a power law. At criticality, order-parameter fluctuations diverge and their spatial correlation decays as a power law1. In systems where the tuning parameter and order parameter are coupled, the critical point can become an attractor, and self-organized criticality (SOC) results2,3. Here we argue, using satellite data, that a critical value of water vapour (the tuning parameter) marks a non-equilibrium continuous phase transition to a regime of strong atmospheric convection and precipitation (the order parameter)—with correlated regions on scales of tens to hundreds of kilometres. Despite the complexity of atmospheric dynamics, we find that important observables conform to the simple functional forms predicted by the theory of critical phenomena. In meteorology the term 'quasi-equilibrium' refers to a balance between slow large-scale driving processes and rapid release of buoyancy by moist convection4. Our study indicates that the attractive quasi-equilibrium state, postulated long before SOC (ref. 5), is the critical point of a continuous phase transition and is thus an instance of SOC.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Global and Planetary Change

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/6fcefdb3e091f9d6166578f68d20c9081c158307

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Economics and Econometrics

1. Bjorn Stevens
2. Á. Corral
3. Dante R. Chialvo
4. Anna Deluca
5. Chris Bretherton

In Global and Planetary Change

1. E. Maloney
2. C. DeMott
3. Chris Bretherton
4. Chidong Zhang
5. Bjorn Stevens
6. N. Klingaman
7. Daehyun Kim
8. Hai Lin

Citations in the corpus

• Emergent complex neural dynamics (2010, background): “Approaches to this problem, for a variety of historical and conceptual reasons, are still drawn from connectionist paradigms which restrict the dynamics to be generated by circuits, and consequently funnel our efforts in the same sterile direction.”
• A Cumulus Parameterization with State-Dependent Entrainment Rate. Part I: Description and Sensitivity to Temperature and Humidity Profiles (2010, background): “…et al. 1995; Brown and Zhang 1997; Sherwood 1999; Sherwood and Wahrlich 1999; Bretherton et al. 2004b; Sobel et al. 2004; Biasutti et al. 2006; Peters and Neelin 2006; Takayabu et al. 2006; Neelin et al. 2008) and CRM results (Tompkins 2001; Redelsperger et al. 2002; Grabowski 2003;…”
• A Stochastic Parameterization for Deep Convection Based on Equilibrium Statistics (2008, background): “Whether any such separation exists has been questioned (e.g., Mapes 1997), most recently on the basis of evidence for 1/f noise (Yano et al. 2001, 2004a) and self-organized criticality (Peters and Neelin 2006) in the tropics.”
• Tracking Pulses of the Madden–Julian Oscillation (2013, background): “Hypothesis I is built upon the abundant literature on the sensitivity of convection to environmental moisture (Brown and Zhang 1997; Raymond 2001; Kuang and Bretherton 2006; Peters and Neelin 2006).”
• Fifty Years of Research on the Madden‐Julian Oscillation: Recent Progress, Challenges, and Perspectives (2020, background): “As a result, heavy area‐averaged rainfall associated with oceanic deep convection mostly occurs in moist environments as shown in Figure 3 (Adames, 2017; Bretherton et al., 2004; Kuo et al., 2019; O. Peters & Neelin, 2006; Rushley et al., 2018; Thayer‐Calder & Randall, 2009).”
• DYAMOND: the DYnamics of the Atmospheric general circulation Modeled On Non-hydrostatic Domains (2019, background): “In the tropics, precipitation and circulation are very tightly coupled, and column water is a very good indicator of precipitation (Bretherton et al. 2004; Peters and Neelin 2006; Mapes et al. 2018).”
• Fitting and goodness-of-fit test of non-truncated and truncated power-law distributions (2012, background): “…and criticality are very reasonable in the context of most of the geosystems mentioned above (Corral, 2010; Peters and Christensen, 2006; Peters and Neelin, 2006), one cannot rule out other mechanisms for the emergence of power-law distributions (Czechowski, 2003; Dickman, 2003;…”