Measurements of water droplet size distributions in a turbulent wind tunnel

Abstract

In order to study the behaviour of cloud droplets at the cloud-clear interface, the “Solving The Entrainment Puzzle” (STEP) project examined a droplet stream in the Turbulent Leipzig Aerosol Cloud Interaction Simulator (LACIS-T). LACIS-T comprises two particle free air streams, that are turbulently mixed, and during the experiment one air stream was resembling in-cloud conditions, whereas the other air stream was set to out-of-cloud conditions. A droplet stream was injected by a droplet generator into the mixing plane of the two air streams. Droplet size distributions were observed with a phase Doppler anemometer at various levels in the measurement section of LACIS-T, corresponding to different residence times of the droplets in the turbulent environment. Additionally, observations were made using different flow speeds in the two air streams to create shear flows in the wind tunnel. The experiment was accompanied by computational fluid dynamics simulations to provide a full 3D representation of meteorological fields and turbulence parameters. This manuscript provides a description of the laboratory settings and instrumentation, the experimental design, the simulations, and a general overview of the data. We invite the scientific community for joint data analysis and numerical studies using the data which is freely available from the Eurochamp Data Centre, see Table in the Data availability section for details.