The Radiative‐Convective Equilibrium Model Intercomparison Project (RCEMIP) is an intercomparison of multiple types of numerical models configured in radiative‐convective equilibrium (RCE). RCE is an idealization of the tropical atmosphere that has long been used to study basic questions in climate science. Here, we employ RCE to investigate the role that clouds and convective activity play in determining cloud feedbacks, climate sensitivity, the state of convective aggregation, and the equilibrium climate. RCEMIP is unique among intercomparisons in its inclusion of a wide range of model types, including atmospheric general circulation models (GCMs), single column models (SCMs), cloud‐resolving models (CRMs), large eddy simulations (LES), and global cloud‐resolving models (GCRMs). The first results are presented from the RCEMIP ensemble of more than 30 models. While there are large differences across the RCEMIP ensemble in the representation of mean profiles of temperature, humidity, and cloudiness, in a majority of models anvil clouds rise, warm, and decrease in area coverage in response to an increase in sea surface temperature (SST). Nearly all models exhibit self‐aggregation in large domains and agree that self‐aggregation acts to dry and warm the troposphere, reduce high cloudiness, and increase cooling to space. The degree of self‐aggregation exhibits no clear tendency with warming. There is a wide range of climate sensitivities, but models with parameterized convection tend to have lower climate sensitivities than models with explicit convection. In models with parameterized convection, aggregated simulations have lower climate sensitivities than unaggregated simulations.

Previous work has shown that convection will self-organize in cloud-system-resolving model simulations of radiative-convective equilibrium, and it has been suggested that the convective envelope of the Madden-Julian oscillation (MJO) may be organized by similar processes on a much larger scale. Here we present support for that hypothesis based on simulations with SP-CAM with globally uniform SST. Without rotation, convection self-organizes into large ($4000 km) clusters surrounded by dry regions, while with Earth-like rotation the model produces a robust MJO. The nonrotating aggregation and MJO are found to have similar budgets of moist static energy, both being supported by diabatic feedbacks, particularly cloud-longwave interaction. Mechanism denial experiments show that longwave heating anomalies associated with high clouds are essential to the nonrotating aggregation, and amplify the MJO. Simulations using the conventional CAM show a weaker MJO and a much weaker tendency for nonrotating aggregation, and both MJO activity and aggregation intensity are found to increase with the entrainment rate in the deep convection parameterization.

The Madden-Julian oscillation (MJO) is the dominant mode of tropical intraseasonal variability, characterized by an eastward-propagating envelope of convective anomalies with a 30-70-day time scale. Here, the authors report changes in MJO activity across coupled simulations with a superparameterized version of the NCAR Community Earth System Model. They find that intraseasonal OLR variance nearly doubles between a preindustrial control run and a run with 43CO 2 . Intraseasonal precipitation increases at a rate of roughly 10% per 1 K of warming, and MJO events become 20%-30% more frequent. Moist static energy (MSE) budgets of composite MJO events are calculated for each scenario, and changes in budget terms are used to diagnose the physical processes responsible for changes in the MJO with warming. An increasingly positive contribution from vertical advection is identified as the most likely cause of the enhanced MJO activity. A decomposition links the changes in vertical advection to a steepening of the mean MSE profile, which is a robust thermodynamic consequence of warming. Surface latent heat flux anomalies are a significant sink of MJO MSE at 13CO 2 , but this damping effect is reduced in the 43CO 2 case. This work has implications for organized tropical variability in past warm climates as well as future global warming scenarios.