Abstract
The early Woods Hole aircraft observations and entrainment postulates led to collaboration with the Imperial College convection group on a series of laboratory experiments on buoyant bubbles and thermals. Miscible fluids were used, which were found to entrain inversely as the horizontal dimension. Erosion occurred only in a stable environment. Follow-on experiments involved two-layer fluid experiments by Saunders and a series of plume and thermal experiments by J. S. Turner, in which simulations of an unstable environment and phase changes were undertaken.
These experiments laid the foundations for early cumulus models; they are reviewed in that light as well as in the light of current important frontiers concerning convective cloud behavior.
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© 1983 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht
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Simpson, J. (1983). Cumulus Clouds: Interactions Between Laboratory Experiments and Observations as Foundations for Models. In: Lilly, D.K., Gal-Chen, T. (eds) Mesoscale Meteorology — Theories, Observations and Models. NATO ASI Series, vol 114. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-2241-4_22
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-2241-4_22
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