Estimating Phase Transition Rates in Shallow Cumulus Clouds from Mass Flux. Part I: Theory and Numerical Simulations

Abstract

The system of trade wind cumulus clouds observed during the RICO field project was simulated by an LES model in a domain of the size of a mesoscale model grid. More than 2000 clouds were analyzed by stratifying them by their cloud-top heights. The investigation was focused on phase transition rates (TR), which in warm tropical clouds are represented by the processes of condensation/evaporation. We previously demonstrated, based on LES data, that a nearly perfect correlation (