资源环境科技发展态势分析平台

Strong links are seen in observations between convective clustering and several properties of the Inter‐Tropical Convergence Zone (ITCZ). These links suggest that biases in how climate models simulate the ITCZ may be related to model biases in convective clustering, or that there may be biases in how models represent the relationship between clustering and the ITCZ. We investigate these issues by analyzing convective clustering, and the link between clustering and ITCZ properties in 18 climate models. We find that the links between variability in convective clustering and variability of ITCZ properties are generally weaker and less robust in models than in observations. By contrast, model biases in the climatological convective clustering explain a substantial fraction of the climatological double‐ITCZ bias, though they do not explain biases in the climatological ITCZ width.