the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.
| 30 Dec 2025
Effects of convective intensity and organisation on the structure and lifecycle of deep convective clouds
Abstract. The structure of anvil clouds is important for their effects on the climate, as the net radiative effect depends on the balance of thick and thin areas. Recent studies have shown an important, warming feedback to climate change due to the thinning of anvils, however there is no clear mechanism behind these observed changes. Previous studies have shown a relationship between the intensity of convection and the proportion of thin anvil. In this study, we use cloud tracking approach with geostationary satellite observations to relate changes in anvil properties to convective intensity and organisation over their entire lifecycle. We find that while increasing intensity of convection is linked to an increase in the proportion of thin anvil, increasing organisation has no effect. Furthermore, these two convective processes also have contrasting effects on the lifecycle of anvil clouds. As the albedo response depends on changes in anvil structure, differences in convective regimes which prefer either organised or isolated but intense convection may lead to regional differences in anvil feedbacks. We propose that the anvil structure response is a combination of effects from the impact of convective intensity on initial anvil formation and changes in anvil dissipation rate due to effects on sedimentation rates and sublimation rates from changes in the anvil environment. Understanding each of these processes and their relative impacts is vital to understanding the future response of anvil structure to climate change.
Competing interests: At least one of the (co-)authors is a member of the editorial board of Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics.
Publisher's note: Copernicus Publications remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims made in the text, published maps, institutional affiliations, or any other geographical representation in this paper. While Copernicus Publications makes every effort to include appropriate place names, the final responsibility lies with the authors. Views expressed in the text are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher.- Preprint
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Status: final response (author comments only)
- RC1: 'Comment on egusphere-2025-6391', Anonymous Referee #1, 20 Jan 2026
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RC2: 'Comment on egusphere-2025-6391', Anonymous Referee #2, 05 Feb 2026
Summary
The authors tracked many (million+) deep convective storms over their lifecycle using GOES-16 satellite data of the continental USA. Convective intensity and organization are identified using proxies and then used to bin the data to analyze how both the structure and lifecycle of deep convective storms depend on intensity and organization. The authors make a distinction between thin and thick anvil in their analysis as well, related the differences in radiative forcing and therefore potential climate feedbacks.
The questions and datasets presented by the authors are interesting and worthwhile to study. It is also great that the whole tracked dataset is shared openly.
However, the manuscript requires major revisions before it can be considered for publication. The revisions primarily relate to questions about the methodology and clarity of writing. The comments are group in major/minor, below.
Major commentsMaximum cooling rate of initial core of a tracked system as a proxy for convective intensity is not shown to be valid. There is certainly merit to the idea, but it is not shown to work as intended. Three potential problems:
- Moist adiabatic lapse rate is not constant with height. Slow but deep convection might show up as faster rising than fast but lower to mid tropospheric convection.
- maximum cooling rate of initial core might not be representative of the intensity of the whole system over its life time.
- Intensity itself is not 1:1 correlated to vertical rising motion of an updraft. It can vary strongly with vertical wind shear and thus storm mode, for example.Doubts about core-count as a proxy for convective organization. Single core systems can be very organized, e.g. supercells, and multi-core systems can be highly disorganized, think of free convection in a shear-free environment with connecting anvils. As such, the metric to use a core-count as a proxy for the degree of convective organization hides a wide spectrum of possible storm modes. Without knowing how the storm stacking deals with single and multi-core systems, and in the absence of the meteorological environment, it is hard to understand what exactly the core-count metric actually represents.
Tropics vs. extra-tropics. The cloud tracking dataset is primarily situated over the extra-tropics, whereas the cited literature regarding anvil feedbacks is primarily focused on the tropics. It is not immediately obvious if all the same ideas can be applied. Furthermore, Figure 1 uses a tropical profile, why not use a mid-latitude profile representative of the domain of the study? Also, the authors define the tropics as 30S to 30N (Figure 5, e.g.), whereas it is 23.4S to 23.4N, which leaves only a small fraction of their domain really in the tropics. Perhaps the more extreme south and northern parts of the domains can be compared to see if there are clear differences in findings?
Overall clarity of writing and manuscript structure. Many aspects that seem important for understanding the methodology, results, and subsequent interpretation are not expressed in a transparent way. A better storyline/narrative could greatly improve the readability of this study.
Specific examples where clearer writing is necessary:
- It is not easy to digest from the abstract or the concluding section what the main findings are. The concluding section itself is quite lengthy, and instead contains more discussion and new questions rather than a conclusion.
- Many abbreviations are used whereas the manuscript would be easier to read if those were written out in full, or at the very least, written out in full in the figure captions.
- It is expressed early on in the manuscript that the distinction between thin and thick anvil clouds are important. However, it takes until section 3.1 to find a more detailed discussion on thick vs, but it is still not clearly expressed what exactly the definition now is. The clearest threshold can be found in line 126, which gives two numbers with an uncertainty range.Very little is said or explained about the tracked dataset. The reader is referred to a pre-print which discusses the dataset, which is insufficient for a study which heavily relies on this dataset for all of its analysis and conclusions. Please include a more complete description.
Minor commentsFigure 2. The colour coding made it unclear that blue and green are both maturing anvil stages, and purple and red dissipating stages. Specifically, green is an extension of blue, but it would be more visually intuitive if it were shown the a different shade of the same colour. This would then translate to all figure that use this colour coding.
Figure 4. This does not appear to show anything that is not also shown in Figure 5, except 4c. The error bars also seem unrealistically small given the uncertainty in tracking and proxy definitions.
Figure 4c. It is hard to believe there is zero variation in total thin area fraction with number of cores per tracked system, unless number of cores is essentially random and the whole dataset mean is equal to the bins of core number? Can this be explained?
Line 80: "Chapter" probably means "study" here, and other mentions of "chapter" in this manuscript should refer to the publications.
Citation: https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-2025-6391-RC2
Data sets
tobac-flow tracked DCCs in GOES ABI CONUS region 2018-2024 William Jones https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.17296632
Interactive computing environment
Material for preparation of "Effects of convective intensity and organisation on the structure and lifecycle of deep convective clouds" William Jones https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.17991287
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Review of “Effects of convective intensity and organisation on the structure and lifecycle of deep convective clouds” by William and Stier
General Impressions: This manuscript presents a comprehensive investigation into the relationship between the fraction of thin anvils and convective intensity (the initial core cooling rate and number of convective cores) throughout the life cycle of deep convective clouds (DCCs). One of the most compelling aspects of the paper is its focus on the temporal evolution of thin and thick anvil fractions, rather than treating the anvil as a static or time-averaged feature. This is a key contribution to the field, as it addresses a difficult but important question: how does convective intensity modulate the structure and evolution of anvil clouds over time?
Overall, the manuscript is very well written, technically sound, and thorough in both methodology and analysis. I found the manuscript very enjoyable to read, and the results are highly compelling—this is one of the best papers I have read. I believe it makes a significant contribution to our understanding not only of anvil evolution, but also of the broader characteristics of convective systems.
Minor Comments: