NUMERICAL SIMULATIONS OF TROPICAL CONVECTIVE CLOUDS OVER CUBA USING AONE-DIMENSIONAL AND TIME-DEPENDENT CLOUD MODEL

A numerical study of the evolution of tropical convective clouds with the use of an eulerian one-dimensional time dependent model is present ed, The model consists of the equation of vertical motion, the mass co ntinuity equation, the thermodynamic equation and the conservation equ ations for each phase of the system. Parameterized microphysics is inc luded. A coefficient was introduced to adjust the value of humidity in the inwards flow by mixing environmental and cloudy air at the cloud boundary. A good correspondence between simulated cloud parameters and radar and aircraft data was obtained for days with deep convective ac tivity by tuning the coefficient to a value of 0.5. For shallow convec tion days, cloud parameters were generally overpredicted, especially v ertical velocity. (C) 1998 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.