Statistical derivation of the evolution equation of liquid water path fluctuations in clouds

Abstract

How to distinguish and quantify deterministic and random intluences on the statistics of turbulence data in meteorology cases is discussed from first principles. Liquid water path (LWP) changes in clouds, as retrieved from radio signals, upon different delay times, can be regarded as a stochastic Markov process. A detrended fluctuation analysis method indicates the existence of long range time correlations. The Fokker-Planck equation which models very precisely the LWP fluctuation empirical probability distributions, in particular, their non-Gaussian heavy tails is explicitly derived and written in terms of a drift and a diffusion coefficient. Furthermore, Kramers-Moyal coefficients, as estimated from the empirical data, are found to be in good agreement with their first principle derivation. Finally, the equivalent Langevin equation is written for the LWP increments themselves. Thus rather than the existence of hierarchical structures, like an energy cascade process, strong correlations on different timescales, from small to large ones, are considered to be proven as intrinsic ingredients of such cloud evolutions. Copyright 2002 by the American Geophysical Union.