Plenary Lecture

Plenary 4

Jörg Schumacher (TU Ilmenau): Why can't we understand clouds without turbulence

Tuesday, April 19, 2011, 8:45 – 9:30

The evolution of clouds incorporates physical processes on spatial scales that reach from sub-micrometre lengths to kilometres and time scales from milliseconds to hours. In the last years, significant progress has been made to understand and connect at least some of these multiscale processes better. New field measurements, laboratory experiments and numerical simulations unraveled a tigth interaction between the turbulence, cloud water droplet dynamics and the nonlinear thermodynamics of phase changes which determines the mixing of cloudy air with the surrounding clear air and the lifetime of the clouds. We will discuss different levels of the description of cloud dynamics that uses also concepts from other fields of fluid mechanics.