The potential impact of turbulent velocity fluctuations on drizzle formation in Cumulus clouds in an idealized 2D setup

This article discusses a potential impact of turbulent velocity fluctuations of the air on a drizzle formation in Cumulus clouds. Two different representations of turbulent velocity fluctuations for a microphysics formulated in a Lagrangian framework are discussed - random walk model and the interpolation, and its effect on microphysical properties of the cloud investigated.

Turbulent velocity fluctuations significantly enhances velocity differences between colliding droplets, especially those having small sizes. As a result drizzle forms faster in simulations including a representation of turbulence. Both representations of turbulent velocity fluctuations, random walk and interpolation, have similar effect on droplet spectrum evolution, but interpolation of the velocity does account for a possible anisotropy in the air velocity.

All discussed simulations show relatively large standard deviation (∼1μm) of the cloud droplet distribution from the onset of cloud formation is observed. Because coalesence processes aerosol inside cloud droplets, detail information about aerosol is available. Results from numerical simulations show that changes in aerosol spectrum due to aerosol processing during droplet coalescence are relatively small during ∼20 min. of the cloud evolution simulated with numerical model.

Drizzle forms initially near the cloud edge, either near the cloud top, where the mass of water is the largest, or near the entrainment eddies.