Abstract
One of the key small-scale processes that necessarily require
parameterisation is the turbulent mixing of cloudy and cloud-free air,
i.e. entrainment and detrainment (in the following simplified as
entrainment), which describe the in-mixing of ambient air into the cloud
and the mixing of cloudy air into the environment surrounding the cloud,
respectively. Entrainment changes cloud particle properties such as
number concentrations and sizes, which also modifies the radiative
properties of the cloud, and has important implications for cloud
lifetime. No reliable formulation exists to date that allows
understanding and describing entrainment in terms of cloud- and
environmental physical quantities. This is despite the fact that a wide
variety of entrainment parameterisations exists. However, their
dependencies on meteorological parameters remain controversial. Indeed,
the mixing processes (including entrainment) and their treatment in the
numerical models have been found to be responsible for much of the large
spread found in climate sensitivity estimates. A combination of
measurements in the turbulent wind tunnel LACIS-T at TROPOS and
computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulations is used to identify the
main parameters that govern the strength of entrainment. Here, we will
present first results from the observations in LACIS-T, where the two
air streams of the wind tunnel are used to mimic in-cloud and
out-of-cloud conditions. Conditions in one of the air streams are varied
to test the impact of the corresponding parameters (i.e. temperature,
relative humidity, air speed) on the entrainment. Cloud droplets are
induced by a droplet generator. The measurements are accompanied by CFD
simulations which are verified by the point measurements in the wind
tunnel and allow to retrieve full 3D fields.