Wiley, Quarterly Journal of the Royal Meteorological Society, 642(135), p. 1307-1320, 2009
DOI: 10.1002/qj.441
Full text: Unavailable
A novel simulation model of cloud microphysics is developed, which is named Super-Droplet Method (SDM). SDM enables accurate calculation of cloud microphysics with reasonable cost in computation. A simple SDM for warm rain, which incorporates sedimentation, condensation/evaporation, stochastic coalescence, is developed. The methodology to couple SDM and a non-hydrostatic model is also developed. It is confirmed that the result of our Monte Carlo scheme for the coalescence of super-droplets agrees fairly well with the solution of stochastic coalescence equation. A preliminary simulation of a shallow maritime cumulus formation initiated by a warm bubble is presented to demonstrate the practicality of SDM. Further discussions are devoted for the extension and the computational efficiency of SDM to incorporate various properties of clouds, such as, several types of ice crystals, several sorts of soluble/insoluble CCNs, their chemical reactions, electrification, and the breakup of droplets. It is suggested that the computational cost of SDM becomes lower than spectral (bin) method when the number of attributes $d$ becomes larger than some critical value, which may be $2∼4$.