Abstract

MONTOYA GAVIRIA, Gerardo de Jesús. ON THE CONTINUOUS GROWTH EQUATION FOR COALESCENCE IN CLOUDS AND PRECIPITATION . Earth Sci. Res. J. [online]. 2005, vol.9, n.1, pp.36-40. ISSN 1794-6190.

Usually, it is assumed in the continuous growth equation by coalescence, that mass and terminal velocity of the collected drops are negligible in comparison with the mass and velocity of the collector drop. These assumptions, which are reasonable in warm cloud modeling, appear to be not so adequate for mixed phase clouds, where interactions between different categories (cloud water, rain water, crystal ice, graupel , hail) have to be considered. When the above constraints are removed, new particular solutions of the continuous growth equation arise, which are presented in this paper. Two solutions are obtained by assuming a gamma droplet distribution. The first solution is obtained for a terminal velocity that is approximated by a power-law, while the second derives from a polynomial approximation. These solutions may be of interest for use with explicit microphysical parameterizations in mesoscale models

Keywords : Coalescence; Continuous growth; clouds; precipitation.

        · abstract in Spanish     · text in English     · English ( pdf )