Preliminary evaluation of the effect of electro-coalescence with conducting sphere approximation on the formation of warm cumulus clouds using SCALE-SDM version 0.2.5–2.3.0

Abstract

The phenomenon of electric fields applied to droplets, inducing droplet coalescence, is called the electro-coalescence effect. An analytic expression for electro-coalescence with the accurate electrostatic force for a pair of droplets with opposite-sign charges is established by treating the droplets as conducting spheres (CSs). To investigate this effect, we applied a weak electric field to a cumulus cloud using a cloud model that employs the super-droplet method, a probabilistic particle-based microphysics method. This study employs a two-dimensional (2D) large-eddy simulation (LES) in a flow-coupled model to examine aerosol microphysics (such as collision–coalescence enhancement, velocity fluctuations, and supersaturation fluctuations) in warm cumulus clouds without relying on subgrid dynamics. In the simulation, we assume that droplets carry opposite-sign charges and are well mixed within the cloud. The charge is not treated as an individual particle attribute. To assess fluctuation effects, we conducted 50 simulations with varying pseudo-random number sequences for each electro-coalescence treatment. The results show that, with CS treatment, the electrostatic force contributes a larger effect on cloud evolution than in previous research. With a lower charge limit of the maximum charge amount on the droplet, the domain total precipitation with CS treatment for droplets with opposite signs is higher than that with the no-charge (NC) setting. Compared to previous work, the multi-image dipole treatment of CS results in higher precipitation. It is found that the electro-coalescence effect could affect rain formation even when the droplet charge is at the lower charge limit. High pollution levels result in greater sensitivity to electro-coalescence. The results show that, when the charge ratio between two droplets is over 100, the short-range attractive electric force due to the multi-image dipole would also significantly enhance precipitation for the cumulus. It is indicated that, although the accurate treatment of the electrostatic force with the CS method would require 30 % longer computation time than before, it is worthwhile to include it in cloud, weather, and climate models.