Abstract The organization of clouds in the Intertropical Convergence Zone (ITCZ) varies markedly from day‐to‐day. To investigate how different mesoscale cloud patterns relate to the mean properties of the ITCZ, this study identifies and classifies recurrent patterns and examines their spatial and temporal distributions. Focusing on the Atlantic ITCZ region, we define five mesoscale cloud patterns: Line , Double Line , Broad , Cluster , and Speckles . These were manually identified in more than 6,600 satellite images from 1983 to 2023 for two seasons (July, August, September and December, January, February). The Line pattern, corresponding to the east–west band of maximum cloud cover typically associated with the ITCZ, is the most frequent individual pattern, but all other patterns combined occur more often. Clear regional and seasonal differences for individual patterns also emerge, suggesting that mesoscale cloud organization influences the regional and seasonal characteristics of the mean ITCZ.
Hayo et al. (Mon,) studied this question.