Convective Ripening and Initiation of Rainfall

Abstract

This paper discusses the evolution of the droplet size distribution for a liquid-in-gas aerosol contained in a Rayleigh-Bénard cell. It introduces a non-collisional model for broadening the droplet size distribution, termed 'convective ripening'. The paper also considers the initiation of rainfall from ice-free cumulus clouds. It is argued that while collisional mechanisms cannot explain the production of rain from clouds with water droplet diameters of $20\mu \mathrm{m}$, the non-collisional convective ripening mechanism gives a much faster route to increasing the size of the small fraction of droplets that grow into raindrops.

6 pages, no figures

References in corpus (1)

• Logarithmic temperature profiles in turbulent Rayleigh-Bénard convection