Entrainment in resolved, dry thermals

Publication Year
2019

Type

Journal Article
Abstract

Entrainment in cumulus convection remains ill-understood and difficult to quantify. For instance, entrainment is widely believed to be a fundamentally turbulent process, even though Turner (1957) pointed out that dry thermals entrain primarily because of buoyancy (via a dynamical constraint requiring an increase in radius r). Furthermore, entrainment has been postulated to obey a 1/r scaling, but this scaling has not been firmly established. Here, we study the classic case of dry thermals in a neutrally stratified environment using fully resolved direct numerical simulation. We combine this with a thermal tracking algorithm which defines a control volume for the thermal at each time, allowing us to directly measure entrainment. We vary the Reynolds number Re of our thermals between laminar (Re ≈ 600) and turbulent (Re ≈ 6000) regimes, finding only a 20% variation in entrainment rate ɛ, supporting the claim that turbulence is not necessary for entrainment. We also directly verify the postulated ε ~ 1/r scaling law.

Journal
Journal of the Atmospheric Sciences
Volume
76
Issue
12
Pages
3785-3801
Date Published
Dec 2019
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