资源环境科技发展态势分析平台

Entrainment is an important process affecting convective transport and is a key parameter in convection modeling. For over half a century, an inverse relationship between entrainment rate (λ) and convective core size (R) has been used in modeling convective clouds. This short letter revisits the relation using multiple years of CloudSat observations. Results show that the inverse relationship between λ and R is robust. However, they are not scaled by a simple constant. Global satellite observations provide some guidance for choosing the range of the scaling parameter. Further, our analysis shows that continental convective clouds tend to have smaller λ and larger R compared to oceanic convective clouds, suggesting that vertical mass transport by continental convection is more efficient. The satellite‐based study of the relation has the potential to become a new diagnostic metric for assessing the representation of convection in weather and climate models.