Public Physic Colloquium in the Winter Terms 2010/2011 in Münster
Place:     Germany, 48149 Münster, Wilhelm-Klemm-Str. 10, IG I, HS 2
Time:     Thursday, 02.12.2010  16:00 h c.t.
Colloquium Coffee at 15:45 h  at the Lecture Hall

Cloud patterns in shallow moist convection

Prof. Dr. Jörg Schuhmacher, Technische Universität Ilmenau

The most prominent appearance of moist turbulent convection are clouds in the atmosphere of the Earth and other planets. A better understanding of their formation and life cycles is of central interest for more reliable predictions of climate change. We study cloud formation processes numerically in the setting of so-called moist turbulent Rayleigh-B\'{e}nard convection with a simplified thermodynamics of phase changes. The sensitivity of this problem to changes of the Rayleigh number, the aspect ratio of the convection layer and the water vapor concentration is studied. We also discuss the relation of turbulent transport across the layer to the cloud cover and compare our results with those from numerical experiments that use parametrizations of the small-scale turbulence, such as so-called large-eddy simulations.

Invited from: Prof. Dr. U. Hansen