The storms that live in this homogeneous environment typically survive for hundreds of days and rarely, if every merge. This is a distinctive kind of geophysical turbulence that is vortex-dominated but strongly dissipative (if one eliminates the evaporation, the storms decay in a few days). This system provides a new tool to study the tropical storm-like vortices generated in global models.
We hope to perform similar simulations at much higher resolution, without the subgrid parameterizations used here,