Fig. 4: Circulation in convective clouds computed at 3 km resolution in the tropics (20°S to 20°N) from limited model output (20 days) of the control simulation in August.

a Column-maximum updraft velocity \({w}_{\max }\) (black dashed line) and column ice conversion efficiency (gray line with diamond markers) at a given IWP. b Mass streamfunctions in IWP and temperature space (with corresponding IWP percentile indicated below). The black dot marks the position of maximum streamfunction. The streamfunctions have units of 10¹¹ kg s⁻¹ and the contours are equal to 0.01, 0.05 and then equally spaced between 0.25 and 5 with 0.25 spacing. The column-integrated ice conversion efficiency is sensitive to the definition of the upper bound of the ice cloud (see Methods). The upper bound is defined as the highest level where q_i exceeds 2.5 g kg⁻¹ (gray line with diamond markers).