Rainy-Benard Convection

The most studied system of convection in the fluid community is the Rayleigh-Benard one, which (in its canonical set-up) consists of a Boussinesq fluid between two plates, with the lower one held at a high temperature than the upper one. However, this system does lead to the type of convection that is found in Earth’s atmosphere, which is the type that perhaps most affects the human condition, or at least is the most talked about. The single most important difference between the two is that atmospheric convection is profoundly affected by the presence of moisture, which affects the buoyancy, gives rise to a conditional instabilities and rain.  To bridge the gap, we have studied a system that retains many of the simplifying features of the Rayleigh-Benard system, yet which contains a condensible and so moist convection and precipitation. The resulting Rainy-Benard system allows a seamless passage between dry and moist convection in a tractable way.  In this talk I will discuss the system and some of its properties, and present some analytic and numerical results.