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Turbulent mixing at the top of stratocumulus clouds

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 March 2006

J. S. Turner  and
I. K. Yang
J. S. Turner
Affiliation:
Radiophysics Laboratory, CSIRO, Sydney, Australia
Present address, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, Woods Hole, Mass., U.S.A.
I. K. Yang
Affiliation:
Department of Physics, Dong Kook University, Seoul, Korea
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Abstract

The process of mixing at the top of a turbulent cloud layer contains a new feature which has not been considered in previous studies of mixing; evaporation of liquid water can cause density changes which may affect the dynamics. A model experiment has been devised to study this problem, using liquids whose density behaviour is non-linear to simulate evaporation.

The existence of a moist, stable, turbulent region above cloudtop can be explained using the laboratory results, which suggest that this region can be regarded dynamically as part of the cloud. Comparison of the rates of mixing in the model experiments with and without ‘evaporation’ suggests that evaporation could cause a small decrease in the mixing rate for a given density difference, but the change would be negligible in practice. This result also sheds some light on the mechanism of mixing, in both the linear and non-linear cases.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of Fluid Mechanics , Volume 17 , Issue 2 , October 1963 , pp. 212 - 224
Copyright
© 1963 Cambridge University Press

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References

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