A novel approach to modelling small-scale cloud variability in the atmosphere

When we design weather-forecasting and climate models we have to average over (‘parametrize’) smaller scales of the atmospheric flow. Our parametrizations are generally based on our understanding of idealizations, typically the assumption that the smaller-scales are horizontally homogeneous and in steady-state (equilibrium). The resulting parametrization thus produces horizontally homogeneous steady-state solutions. In reality, even where this is a good approximation, the real flow has variability at scales that are larger than the dominant energy containing scales of the process being parametrized but are important for other aspects of the system.