Izumi Saito

Continuous growth of cloud droplets in cumulus cloud

A new method to seamlessly simulate the continuous growth of droplets advected by turbulent flow inside a cumulus cloud was developed from first principle. A cubic box ascending with a mean updraft inside a cumulus cloud was introduced and the updraft velocity was self-consistently determined in such a way that the mean turbulent velocity within the box vanished. All the degrees of freedom of the cloud droplets and turbulence fields were numerically integrated. The box ascended quickly inside the cumulus cloud due to the updraft and the mean radius of the droplets grew from 10 to 24 μm for about 10 min. The turbulent flow tended to slow down the time evolutions of the updraft velocity, the box altitude and the mean cloud droplet radius. The size distribution of the cloud droplets in the updraft case was narrower than in the absence of the updraft. It was also found that the wavenumeber spectra of the variances of the temperature and water vapor mixing ratio were nearly constant in the low wavenumber range. The future development of the new method was argued.

Mechanism for the Formation of Equatorial Superrotation in Forced Shallow-Water Turbulence with Newtonian Cooling

AbstractForced shallow-water turbulence on a rotating sphere with Newtonian cooling is examined with the aim of elucidating the mechanism of the robust formation of equatorial superrotation reported by R. K. Scott and L. M. Polvani. It is shown that the Newtonian cooling term distorts the structure of the Hough modes. This distortion can be visualized as either the westward or eastward tilting of the equiphase line with increasing absolute value of latitude; the structural change of the Hough modes leads to the acceleration of the zonal-mean flow. A statistical analysis based on a weak-nonlinear theory predicts that stochastically excited Hough modes generate a prograde equatorial jet, the profile of which is quantitatively consistent with that of the ensemble-averaged zonal-mean flow obtained in nonlinear time evolutions. The predicted prograde equatorial jet originates mainly from the acceleration produced by Rossby modes, the equiphase line of which is tilted westward by the Newtonian cooling term. Thi...

Angular distribution of energy spectrum in two-dimensional β-plane turbulence in the long-wave limit

The time-evolution of two-dimensional decaying turbulence governed by the long-wave limit, in which LD/L → 0, of the quasi-geostrophic equation is investigated numerically. Here, LD is the Rossby radius of deformation, and L is the characteristic length scale of the flow. In this system, the ratio of the linear term that originates from the β-term to the nonlinear terms is estimated by a dimensionless number, γ=βLD2/U, where β is the latitudinal gradient of the Coriolis parameter, and U is the characteristic velocity scale. As the value of γ increases, the inverse energy cascade becomes more anisotropic. When γ ⩾ 1, the anisotropy becomes significant and energy accumulates in a wedge-shaped region where |l|>3|k| in the two-dimensional wavenumber space. Here, k and l are the longitudinal and latitudinal wavenumbers, respectively. When γ is increased further, the energy concentration on the lines of l=±3k is clearly observed. These results are interpreted based on the conservation of zonostrophy, which is a...