| Issue |
EPL
Volume 108, Number 4, November 2014
|
|
|---|---|---|
| Article Number | 49001 | |
| Number of page(s) | 6 | |
| Section | Geophysics, Astronomy and Astrophysics | |
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1209/0295-5075/108/49001 | |
| Published online | 17 November 2014 | |
Convective ripening and initiation of rainfall
Department of Mathematics and Statistics, The Open University - Walton Hall, Milton Keynes, MK7 6AA, England, UK
Received: 23 July 2014
Accepted: 27 October 2014
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 
, 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.
PACS: 92.60.Nv – Cloud physics and chemistry / 92.60.hk – Convection, turbulence, and diffusion / 92.60.Mt – Particles and aerosols
© EPLA, 2014
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