Self-organized criticality in cumulus clouds

M. N. Najafi, J. Cheraghalizadeh, H. J. Herrmann

Published 2020-10-07Version 1

The shape of clouds has proven to be essential for classifying them. Our analysis of images from fair weather cumulus clouds reveals that, besides by turbulence they are driven by self-organized criticality (SOC). Our observations yield exponents that support the fact the clouds, when projected to two dimensions (2D), exhibit conformal symmetry compatible with $c=-2$ conformal field theory (CFT), in contrast to 2D turbulence which has $c=0$ CFT. By using a combination of the Navier-Stokes equation, diffusion equations and a coupled map lattice (CML) we successfully simulated cloud formation, and obtained the same exponents.