Title: Darwinian organization of convection; and 28 minute Liquid Sunshine movie
Abstract
I will briefly introduce my group’s projects as conversation starters, emphasizing recent attempts to detect (or at least inject, as a hypothesis) evolutionary processes in convective organization. Organization is abundantly observable in cloud-field patterns; impactful through rainfall patterns in the deep case; and has understandable if modest importance in the vertical and time domains driving larger-scale atmospheric dynamics. Ecological evolution differs from physics’s simpler “quasi-equilibrium” ideas, which presuppose a single easily calculable optimum that simple systems drive strongly toward. Darwinian evolution happens in high-dimensional “landscapes” of “fitness" (or, in leading-edge discourses, time-dependent seascapes). With no clear optimum, nor finite-time hope to find it, the Darwinian principle is merely: improvement with time through survivorship selection, non-uniquely. How might this principle apply to cloud-pattern development? Between “random” and “optimum” lies everything real: surely this insight has some place in pattern-development aspects of our world-models, at least conceptually? More questions than answers.
After this ~25-minute mental priming, I will show my 2026 film, 28-minutes of convection data imagery + music (by Ideaphoria of Amsterdam), entitled Synthony I: Liquid Sunshine. The film has idea-interludes about how the atmosphere’s energy and water cycles work, and the Darwinian notion as an intellectual third leg of a stool with the music+visuals. The three legs hold attention (fascinate) far more than any one alone could, we find.
