RESEARCH LETTER
10.1029/2021GL096684
Key Points:
• W e use machine-learning
classification based on visual
inspection to identify green cumulus
cloud fields
• We establish a novel satellite-based
data set of high-resolution green
cumulus images over three areas
worldwide
• We show that green cumulus
are driven by similar large-scale
meteorology regardless of their
geographical location
Supporting Information:
Supporting Information may be found in
the online version of this article.
Correspondence to:
I. Koren,
ilan.koren@weizmann.ac.il
Citation:
Dror, T., Silverman, V., Altaratz, O.,
Chekroun, M. D., & Koren, I. (2022).
Uncovering the large-scale meteorology
that drives continental, shallow,
green cumulus through supervised
classification. Geophysical Research
Letters, 49, e2021GL096684. https://doi.
org/10.1029/2021GL096684
Received 21 OCT 2021
Accepted 8 APR 2022
© 2022. The Authors.
This is an open access article under
the terms of the Creative Commons
Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs
License, which permits use and
distribution in any medium, provided the
original work is properly cited, the use is
non-commercial and no modifications or
adaptations are made.
DROR ET AL.
Uncovering the Large-Scale Meteorology That Drives
Continental, Shallow, Green Cumulus Through Supervised
Classification
Tom Dror1 , Vered Silverman1 , Orit Altaratz1 , Mickaël D. Chekroun1 , and Ilan Koren1
1
Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences, Weizmann Institute of Science, Rehovot, Israel
Abstract One of the major sources of uncertainty in climate prediction results from the limitations in
representing shallow cumulus (Cu) in models. Recently, a class of continental shallow convective Cu was
shown to share distinct morphological properties and to emerge globally mostly over forests and vegetated
areas, thus named greenCu. Using machine-learning supervised classification, we identify greenCu fields over
three regions, from the tropics to mid- and higher-latitudes, and establish a novel satellite-based data set called
greenCuDb, consisting of 1° × 1° sized, high-resolution MODIS images. Using greenCuDb in conjunction with
ERA5 reanalysis data, we create greenCu composites for different regions and reveal that greenCu are driven by
similar large-scale meteorological conditions, regardless of their geographical locations throughout the world's
continents. These conditions include distinct profiles of temperature, humidity and large-scale vertical velocity.
The boundary layer is anomalously warm and moderately humid, and is accompanied by a strong large-scale
subsidence in the free troposphere.
Plain Language Summary It has been recently shown that a large part of low-altitude clouds over
the world's continents share universal properties, especially in the way these clouds are organized in time and
space, and their preferred formation over forests and vegetated areas, hence named greenCu. In this study, by
exploiting machine-learning classification tools, we probe over 450,000 high-resolution satellite images, over
different land areas and climatic conditions, spanning a period of 10 years, to produce a novel data set of about
90,000 images of such greenCu. The physical insight gained by this operation is that greenCu form under
similar meteorological conditions irrespectively of their geographical locations and their climatic conditions,
throughout the globe.
1. Introduction
Shallow convective cumulus (Cu) clouds, often referred to as fair-weather clouds, are ubiquitous over the world's
oceans and continents (Bony et al., 2004; Norris, 1998). These clouds impose a net cooling effect at the surface,
since they reflect part of the incoming solar radiation while having far less influence on the outgoing long-
wave radiation (Boucher et al., 2013). Despite extensive research, shallow Cu still constitute an important factor
in the uncertainty related to climate sensitivity and cloud feedback (Bony, 2005; Webb et al., 2006; Zelinka
et al., 2020), with their space-time organization and environmental conditions playing a potential major role
regarding the latter (Bony et al., 2020; Nuijens & Siebesma, 2019; Vial et al., 2017).
There exists an extensive amount of literature on marine shallow Cu, that is, trade Cu, which are mostly confined
to the tropical and subtropical oceans. In this marine environment, sea surface temperatures are relatively warm
and stable, and moderate trade winds and large-scale subsidence in the free troposphere (FT) prevail (Stevens
et al., 2016). These conditions over the ocean exert a relatively weak and steady forcing which promotes shal-
low convection. In contrast, continental shallow Cu, are by far less studied. These clouds prevail in much more
diverse locations over the world's continents. Continental shallow Cu experience a stronger and time-dependent
forcing stemming from the more significant diurnal cycle over land. They form at late morning, peak in the
early afternoon, and dissipate before sunset, coinciding with the diurnal cycle of surface fluxes and convective
boundary layer (CBL) development (Berg & Kassianov, 2008; Lenderink et al., 2004). Recently, a large subset
of continental shallow Cu was shown to look similar, regardless of the clouds' locations around the world, and to
share many cloud field properties, for example, cloud size distribution, cloud fraction (CF), organization patterns,
and their tendency to form over forested and vegetated regions, thus termed greenCu (Dror et al. (2020), here-
after D2020). Despite their small sizes (∼1 km, Lamer and Kollias (2015)) and short lifetimes (∼30 min, Jiang
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 Geophysical Research Letters 10.1029/2021GL096684

et al. (2006)), greenCu form highly organized mesoscale-sized patterns that sustain throughout the day (Dror,
Chekroun, et al., 2021). Stable on one hand, these clouds show high-sensitivity to local conditions such as land-
cover type and topography (Da Silva et al., 2011; Rabin et al., 1990), and also to mesoscale conditions, as shown
for example, for the presence of smoke over the Amazon (Koren et al., 2004).

Yet, an understanding of the large-scale meteorological conditions that allow greenCu to prevail over a wide vari-
ety of geographical environments, from the tropics through mid- and higher-latitudes, is still missing.

To address this question, by exploiting machine-learning (ML) classification tools, we are able to probe over
450,000 high-resolution satellite images, over different land areas (the Amazon, central USA and Eastern Europe)
and climatic conditions, spanning a period of 10 years. We produce a novel data set of ∼90,000 greenCu images,
named greenCuDb (Dror, Silverman, et al., 2021) extracted during the northern hemisphere (NH) summer
(June–July–August [JJA]), which is the dry season in the tropics, when shallow convection prevails. To train the
neural-network (NN) model, we benefit from the visual identification of greenCu patterns operated in D2020
for about 12,000 labeled cloud field images, and analyzed over a much shorter 2-month time-period than in the
present work. As a main result of this study, the inspection of the meteorological and environmental conditions
from ERA5 reanalysis (Hersbach et al., 2020) of the large greenCuDb data set reveals that the greenCu fields
share very similar characteristics irrespectively of their geographical location.

2. Cloud Fields Classification

The need to obtain large data sets of high-resolution, labeled cloud images is a key initial step in building-up
knowledge about the different clouds' properties. With the recent advances of ML methods for image analysis
and classification (e.g., Ker et al. (2017); Kremer et al. (2017)) and dedicated platforms for the underlying algo-
rithms, such clouds' data sets have been produced either from ground (Dev et al., 2015; J. Zhang et al., 2018)
or satellite observations. Thus, various ML-labeled satellite data sets have been obtained for different purposes:
CUMULO (Zantedeschi et al., 2019) for learning cloud classes; Shallow Cloud (Rasp et al., 2020) to explore
mesoscale organization of shallow clouds in the trades; CloudCast (Nielsen et al., 2021) for clouds' forecasting,
and LSCIDMR (Bai et al., 2021) to infer weather systems from clouds. Each of these data sets differ in the clouds
properties and goals they are after, and thus differ in their spatio-temporal resolutions, the spectral bands of the
images, the labels they annotate, and the area and time periods they span. The present study prolongs these recent
efforts for clouds classification by producing a novel ML satellite data set, greenCuDb, which targets specifically
shallow, organized convection over land, from high-resolution MODIS images.

2.1. Training Data Set

The training stage of a ML model for supervised classification heavily relies on the availability of expertly
labeled data, which in turn plays a key role to the model's performance. However, such labeled data sets are
not always available. Here we benefit from such a data set to train our NN model, namely, the visually-labeled
images presented in D2020, based on high-resolution (500 m) MODIS Aqua true-color (RGB) images. The
Aqua satellite crosses the equator at ∼13:30 local solar time, an ideal time to capture the peak of the evolution
of continental shallow convection, since the surface fluxes and many of the CBL processes are maximal at that
time (Brown et al., 2002; Y. Zhang & Klein, 2013). The images were taken over three 14° × 14° continental
regions, which represent different climatic environments, including the Amazon in the tropics (17°S−3°S and
63°W − 49°W), through the USA in the mid-latitudes (30°N−44°N and 96°W−82°W), to Europe in higher-lati-
tudes (46°N−60°N and 27°E−41°E). All regions feature shallow convection during JJA, and constitute greenCu
hotspots. The 14° × 14° sized images were divided to smaller 1° × 1° domains, each comprised of 228 × 228 × 3
pixels, and visually classified to four different classes determined based on human expertise: (a) sparse (no clouds
to a few greenCu), (b) greenCu (organized shallow Cu), (c) transition from shallow to deep convection (deeper
and more clustered greenCu, hereafter transition), and (d) deep convective (large clouds that cover most or all of
the domain, hereafter deep). Figure 1 shows a classic 1° × 1° sized image of each class. Note that other classes
of clouds, such as shallow stratiform or cirrus, are not common over these regions during this season. In case of
images that contain stratus, visible cirrus or smoke, the model is designed such that they will be labeled as deep
convection. See for example, the low CFs shown for the deep class (especially over the Amazon), stemming from

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 Geophysical Research Letters 10.1029/2021GL096684

smokey images (Figure 1). The visual classification was performed over two
months, July–August 2008, and resulted into a total of 12,146 labeled cloud
field images (D2020): 2,762 sparse, 2,142 greenCu, 2,446 transition, and
4,796 deep convective images.

2.2. Classification Model

The ResNet-34 model (He et al., 2016b) that uses 34 layers of convolutional
NN, widely used for image classification purposes (He et al., 2016a), is
trained on the data set obtained from human labeling in D2020 to perform
classification over a larger data set of satellite images. The model encoder
applies a set of convolution operations (Conv2D) and nonlinear activation
functions (ReLU) which are adjusted during the training to detect the mean-
ingful features for a correct classification. For this task, the ResNet model
implementation from the fastai python package (Howard & Gugger, 2020) is
used with kernel size of 3 × 3 on images of 228 × 228 × 3 pixels, initialized
with random weights and biases. To balance the data, the training data set is
Figure 1. Model predictions: boxplot of cloud fraction (CF) per class and
given by 1,500 randomly and uniformly selected labeled images within each
region (Amazon, USA, and Eastern Europe). In each box, the circle marks
the median, the bottom and top edges of the box indicate the 25th and 75th class, out of which 20% are kept for validation. The trained model predicts
percentiles, respectively. The whiskers extend to the most extreme data points greenCu with 90.0% accuracy (acc), and the recall (R), precision (P) and
not considered outliers. Dashed horizontal lines indicate the mean 25th and F1-measure (F1) are 90.0%, 73.6% and 81.1%, respectively (see Support-
75th percentiles of greenCu CF used as lower and upper thresholds to filter the ing Information S1 for more details), which is suitable for the purposes of
greenCu post-processing. Bottom row shows, for each class, a representative
this study. For comparison, when the model was trained with the full data
1° × 1° image.
set from D2020: acc = 91.5%, R = 92.4%, P = 68.5% and F1 = 78.7%. To
assess the model's predictions we compare morphological properties of the
model-labeled and the visually-labeled images. The two datasets show good
agreement and the four classes are consistent in both (Figure S1 in Supporting Information S1). The shift between
the different classes is not sharp and can be ambiguous. For example, a sparse field can essentially be a forming
or dissipating greenCu field, and a transition field may be deeper and/or clustered greenCu (D2020). Also, some
images may have a mixed distribution of different classes. Therefore, confusions between (especially) the tran-
sition to greenCu are expected (Figure S2 in Supporting Information S1) and accounted for in the filtering steps
described in Section 2.3.

2.3. The GreenCuDb Data Set

The classification task resulted in a total of 455,252 images, of which 21.65% (98,582) were labeled as sparse,
18.51% (84,282) as greenCu, 20.18% (91,851) as transition and 39.66% (180,537) as deep. Note that even-though
the model was trained with a balanced data set, it is still able to reproduce the imbalance that exists between
the classes of the visual classification (e.g., the deep class contains about twice the amount of images as each
of the other classes, both in the model-labeled and in the visual data sets). To further improve our confidence
in the model's attribution of a given cloud field to a specific class, we calculate the CF for the classified images
using a cloud mask constructed specifically to detect greenCu (D2020). Figure 1 shows a monotonic increase in
CF for the four classes. This increase is expected since the different classes essentially represent a continuous
shift from almost clear sky (sparse) to an overcast state (deep). While there exist a natural spread in the distri-
butions of CF for both classes and regions, the medians of each distribution are similar for all regions within
the same class, and are well-separated from the other classes, proving that the model successfully discriminates
between the classes (see Figure S1 in Supporting Information S1 for other morphological properties).

Focusing on the greenCu, Figures 2a–2c show examples of such fields for each region. To avoid model false-pos-
itive predictions (i.e., images wrongfully labeled as greenCu), we use the mean of the 25th (0.136) and 75th
(0.291) percentiles of greenCu CF as the upper and lower limits to clean the greenCu data set (green shading
and dotted gray lines in Figure 1). While this filtering affects greenCu CF distributions, it has a negligible
effect on the distributions of other morphological and meteorological variables (Figures S1 and S3 in Supporting

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 Geophysical Research Letters 10.1029/2021GL096684

D  $PD]RQ E 86$ F ((XURSH

G  H I

Figure 2. The greenCu share similar organizational patterns.Examples of 1° × 1° greenCu fields over the (a) Amazon, (b) USA, and (c) Eastern Europe. Observed
Nearest Neighbor Cumulative Density Function (NNCDF) against Poisson NNCDF, and a boxplot of Iorg for the (d) Amazon, (e) USA, and (f) Eastern Europe.

Information S1). Thanks to this strategy, we eliminate approximately 50% of the images but increase the reliabil-
ity of the data set and thus, of the following analyses.

Finally, the new greenCuDb combines high-resolution imagery from three regions worldwide, during 10 JJAs
(2003–2012). It consists 42,128 images, of which 15,727 are from the Amazon, 14,300 from the USA and 12,101
from Eastern Europe, scaling-up the human analysis of D2020 by a factor of ∼20.

As evidenced from the images shown in Figures 2a–2c, greenCu throughout the world appear strikingly similar.
Furthermore, D2020 have shown that beyond this similarity, these fields share many common properties, for
example, their size distributions, the number of clouds in the field and the distances between them, and CF and
cloud top height (CTH). However, it is the distinct and unique organization of greenCu that distinguishes these
fields from the other cloud classes. Indeed, greenCu tend to organize into a regular pattern, taking often the shape
of cloud streets. To quantify and characterize greenCu organization, we use the commonly applied organization
index (Iorg; Weger et al. (1992); Tobin et al. (2012)), which compares the cloud field Nearest Neighbor Cumu-
lative Density Function (NNCDF) to that of a randomly distributed cloud field (Poisson NNCDF, given by the
Weibull distribution). Figures 2d–2f show the mean observed NNCDF against Poisson NNCDF for the greenCu
in the different regions. And a boxplot of Iorg (the area under the NNCDF curve) for each region is shown to the
right (see boxplot of Iorg for all other classes in Figure S1 in Supporting Information S1). The mean NNCDF
curves are similar for all regions and show that greenCu fields deviate from randomness toward a regular (grid-
like) organizational pattern, with medians of Iorg = 0.418, 0.426, 0.424 in the Amazon, USA and Eastern Europe,
respectively. This standard metric to measure clouds' organization against a random field (Weger et al., 1992)
provides further evidence regarding the ability of the trained ML model to predict greenCu patterns. For a more
general discussion regarding probabilistic metrics used in atmosphere science see Bröcker and Smith (2007).

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 Geophysical Research Letters 10.1029/2021GL096684

Figure 3. Large-scale meteorological conditions associated with the different classes (upper-row), greenCu composites per
region (middle-row), and greenCu normalized anomalies from the June–July–August climatological mean (lower-row) in the
Amazon (black), USA (blue), and Eastern Europe (red). Mean vertical profiles of θ, q, RH, and ω (column-wise, from left to
right, respectively). The standard deviations are shown in Figure S4 in Supporting Information S1.

3. Dependence of GreenCu on the Large-Scale Meteorological Conditions

Next, we use the novel greenCuDb to gain insight on the large-scale meteorological conditions associated with
greenCu formation, and to understand how similar cloud fields are formed in such different geographical envi-
ronments. To do so, we create composites for each class by assigning to each image the corresponding ERA5
reanalysis hourly products (Hersbach et al., 2020). We examine the mean vertical profiles of potential tempera-
ture (θ), specific humidity (q), relative humidity (RH), and the large-scale vertical velocity (ω) of the different
classes, the greenCu composites of each region, and the normalized deviations of the greenCu composites from
the corresponding JJA climatological mean (Figure 3). The standard deviations of the mean profiles, and the
climatologies are shown in Figures S4 and S5 in Supporting Information S1, respectively. The composites of the
different classes show consistent behavior in terms of all inspected atmospheric profiles. The different classes
are controlled by the interplay between the temperature, humidity and the large-scale vertical velocity profiles.
Going from the sparse to the deep class, we smoothly shift from a warmer and drier atmosphere, dominated by
subsidence, to a colder and moister atmosphere at which the subsidence dominates at higher altitudes (greenCu
and transition) or is non-existent (deep).

Focusing on the greenCu composites, we compare their characteristic profiles throughout the different regions
(Figures 3e–3h). Although the θ- and q-values differ between the regions, the greenCu RH profiles are remark-
ably similar. In terms of the large-scale vertical velocity, all greenCu composites feature weak updraft near the
surface, overlaid by a large-scale subsidence, but the absolute values and the heights at which ω changes its sign
differ. In the Amazon, the large-scale updraft as well as the overlaying subsidence share moderate values. In the

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 Geophysical Research Letters 10.1029/2021GL096684

USA and Eastern Europe, the updraft is weaker and confined into the lower CBL, near the surface, and turns into
a weak to moderate subsidence throughout the CBL, to finally adjust to a strong subsidence in the FT (altitudes
above 800 mb). The CBL depth (seen here as the height at which RH values sharply decrease) is shown to be
greater for the Amazon than for the other regions, in agreement with D2020. The authors of D2020 showed that
greenCu CTH in the Amazon is larger compared to the USA and Eastern Europe (Figure 5 in D2020).

Although the Amazon, USA, and Eastern Europe regions belong to different climate zones (Köppen, 1923),
and generally exhibit different large-scale circulations, the climatologies of the three regions reveal that during
JJA these environments share stable large-scale conditions, such as warm, humid CBLs (Figure S5 in Support-
ing Information S1). These stable conditions result in the Amazon from the prevalence of the South Atlantic
Subtropical High (Nobre et al., 1998) as the Intertropical Convergence Zone reaches its northward displacement
(∼10°) in JJA. In the USA and Eastern Europe, it is related to the weakening of the extratropical storm track over
mid-latitudes and its migration poleward during NH summer (Parker et al., 1989; Whittaker & Horn, 1981).

To gain insight on the key players discriminating each greenCu composite from the local climatology, we calcu-
late the variable's normalized deviations from their corresponding JJA climatologies by subtracting the clima-
tological mean and dividing by the climatological standard-deviation (Figures 3i–3l). Since greenCu are more
frequent over the Amazon during JJA (D2020), larger anomalies are expected in the USA and Eastern Europe.
The anomalies indicate that the large-scale conditions favoring greenCu formation are obtained by (a) a warmer
CBL (near the surface) and FT compared to the climatologies (Figure 3i). (b) A drier profile (negative anom-
alies), especially near the surface and in the FT in the USA and Eastern Europe, and a moister CBL (positive
anomalies), and drier FT in the Amazon (Figures 3j and 3k). And (c) an increase in the magnitude of the large-
scale subsidence relative to the climatologies, mostly pronounced in the FT (δω > 0 in all regions, becoming
larger as going from the Amazon to the USA to Eastern Europe, Figure 3l). The drier FT and stronger subsidence
(compared to the climatology) in all regions inhibit greenCu's development into deeper clouds such as those of
the transition and/or deep class.

4. Summary and Discussion

By means of visual classification, continental, shallow clouds were shown to share many common properties:
their sizes, CF, the patterns they form, and their preferred formation over forests and vegetated area, named
greenCu (D2020). These results allow us to: (a) scale-up the human analysis of D2020 by producing a novel
machine-learned data set of greenCu images, and this way (b) characterize the large-scale meteorological condi-
tions that drive greenCu and their very existence in such diverse environments throughout the world's continents.

We use morphological properties such as CF as metrics to evaluate the model's predictions and show that it is
able to successfully discriminate between four consistent classes: sparse, greenCu, transition to deep convection,
and deep convection (Figures 1 and S1 in Supporting Information S1). We then restrict greenCu CF, and estab-
lish the new greenCuDb. It contains 42,128 high-resolution greenCu images over three regions from the tropics
(Amazon), to mid-latitude (USA), and higher-latitudes (Eastern Europe), over a period of 10 seasons (JJAs,
2003–2012). One of greenCu's most prominent features is their distinct cloud field organization. It is shown here
to be similar throughout the regions and to exhibit a regular (grid-like) structure (Figure 2), in agreement with
Dror et al. (2020), Dror, Chekroun, et al. (2021).

Using greenCuDb together with ERA5 reanalysis we show that greenCu profiles of potential temperature, specific
humidity and RH and large-scale vertical velocity are distinguished from those of the other classes, and that
greenCu form under similar meteorological conditions regardless of their geographical location. These conditions
include a distinct combination of temperature, humidity and large-scale vertical velocity throughout the CBL and
the FT: the CBL is anomalously warm and just moist enough to allow cloud formation. It is capped by large-
scale subsidence throughout the FT which inhibits the shallow clouds from transitioning to deep convection. A
slightly drier profile with stronger subsidence will result in greenCu dissipation (i.e., sparse-like conditions), and
a colder, moister profile with weaker subsidence will result in greenCu clustering and deepening (i.e., transition/
deep-like conditions).

We believe that the findings of this study, by improving the detection and understanding of shallow Cu, can bene-
fit short-term forecasting over land and estimations of Earth's energy balance. Specifically, the insights regarding

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Acknowledgments
This research received funding from
the European Research Council under
the European Union's Horizon 2020
research and innovation programme
(grant agreement No. 810370). This
research was partially supported by the
Israeli Council for Higher Education via
the Weizmann Data Science Research
Center, by a Ben May Center grant for
theoretical and/or computational research
and by a research grant from the Estate
of Tully and Michele Plesser. The Israel
Meteorological Service and ECMWF are
acknowledged for providing access to
ERA5 data. Finally, we thank two anon-
ymous reviewers, whose comments have
improved the manuscript considerably.
DROR ET AL.
Geophysical Research Letters 10.1029/2021GL096684
the large-scale meteorological conditions propitious to greenCu formation are useful for the parameterization
of such clouds in General Circulation Models as well as advance our understanding in low cloud feedback. The
question of how such cloud fields and their feedback effects will respond to changes in the meteorological condi-
tions within a warming climate, remains however open.
Data Availability Statement
The greenCuDb, the visually-labeled images used to train the model, as well as a Python interface of the ResNet-
34 classifier implementation and training for the greenCu labeling, the final trained classifier used to generate the
greenCuDb, the code of the (ERA5 based) meteorological analysis and the data to reproduce the figures of the
manuscript, are publicly available at https://doi.org/10.34933/wis.000393. ERA5 reanalyzes were downloaded
from https://www.ecmwf.int/en/forecasts/datasets/reanalysis-datasets/era5.
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