Michigan Technological University

Department of Physics

is pleased to announce a colloquium

with

 

Alex Kostinski

Physics Department, MTU

 

 

 

Non-Poissonian Fluctuations in Cloud and Precipitation Systems

 

 

The commonly accepted Poisson model of clouds places droplets and raindrops in space and in time as evenly as randomness allows. This means than no ``blobs'' or ``patches'' are allowed on any length scale and statistical independence holds. While this applies to, for example, counting statistics of molecules in an ideal gas, counter-examples include bunching of photons and clustering of galaxies (both of which violate the statistical independence assumption).

Cloud droplets are suspended in turbulent air. Turbulence is a quick but not a thorough mixer so that ``blobs'' of high and low concentration remain. This implies correlations (lack of statistical independence) on some spatial scales and, therefore, super-Poissonian statistics (larger than the Poissonian variance of number density). This chain of reasoning depends only on the presence of turbulence. Hence, super-Poissonian distributions are likely to be ubiquitous and apply to all kinds of cloud particles and aerosols. Implications of such ``enhanced fluctuations'' might be rather wide-ranging: from droplet collisions and growth to radar meteorology and radiative transfer of visible and IR radiation.

 

 

 

 

Thursday, December 2, 1999

4:00 p.m., Fisher Hall 139

Refreshments will be served