Geoff Vallis on "Rainy-Bénard Convection: An Idealization of a Moist Atmosphere"
Rayleigh-Benard convection is commonly regarded as the benchmark system for convection in a wide variety of settings, and its simplicity has led to a great many theoretical, experimental and computational studies. However, it is often regarded as irrelevant as a model for convection in Earth’s atmosphere because of the significant, almost dominating, influence of moisture in the latter system, in addition to many other complications.
In an attempt to partially bridge the evident gap between these systems we add a condensate to the Rayleigh-Benard system but keep other aspects the same. The resulting ‘Rainy-Benard’ system has very rich behavior and in this talk, Geoff Vallis described some that behavior and other properties of the system.