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-B\'enard 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 \(20\ \mu {\rm m}\), 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.