Abstract. Pockets of open cells (POCs) have been shown to develop within closed-cell stratocumulus (StCu) and a large body of evidence suggests that the development of POCs result from changes in small-scale processes internal to the boundary layer rather than large-scale forcings. Precipitation is widely viewed as a key process important to POC development and maintenance. In this study, GOES-16 satellite observations are used in conjunction with MERRA-2 winds to track and compare the microphysical and environmental evolution of two populations of closed-cell StCu selected by visual inspection over the southeast Pacific Ocean: one group that transitions to POCs and another control group that does not. The high spatio-temporal resolution of the new GOES-16 data allows for a detailed examination of the temporal evolution of POCs in this region. We find that POCs tend to develop near the coast, last tens of hours, are larger than 104 km2, and often (88 % of cases) do not re-close before they exit the StCu deck. Most POCs are observed to form at night and tend to exit the StCu during the day when the StCu is contracting in area. Relative to the control trajectories, POCs have systematically larger effective radii, lower cloud drop number concentrations, comparable conditional in-cloud liquid water path, and a higher frequency of more intense rainfall. Meanwhile, no systematic environmental differences other than boundary-layer height are observed between POC and control trajectories. These results support the consensus view regarding the importance of precipitation on the formation and maintenance of POCs and demonstrate the utility of modern geostationary remote sensing data in evaluating POC lifecycle.
Supplementary material to "A Lagrangian Analysis of Pockets of Open Cells over the Southeast Pacific"
