Caustic activation of rain showers

Details Caustic activation of rain showers Caustic activation of rain showers

2006-04-06

arxiv.org/abs/cond-mat/0604166v1

Phys. Rev. Lett. 97 (2006) 048501

Physics

Condensed Matter

Disordered Systems and Neural Networks

4 pages, 3 figures

Scientific paper

10.1103/PhysRevLett.97.048501

We show quantitatively how the collision rate of droplets of visible moisture in turbulent air increases very abruptly as the intensity of the turbulence passes a threshold, due to the formation of fold caustics in their velocity field. The formation of caustics is an activated process, in which a measure of the intensity of the turbulence, termed the Stokes number St, is analogous to temperature in a chemical reaction: the rate of collision contains a factor exp(-C/St). Our results are relevant to the long-standing problem of explaining the rapid onset of rainfall from convecting clouds. Our theory does not involve spatial clustering of particles.

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