Settling raindrops and rainfall patterns

The dynamics of a small spherical particle in a fluid flow is described by the Maxey–Riley (MR) equation. This equation includes a history force which is often neglected because of prohibitive memory requirements. I will describe a transformation by which we obtain analytical solutions of the complete MR equations for simple flows, and can solve it numerically for all flows within reasonable computational and storage costs. The history force can have a significant effect on raindrop settling and growth.

In the second part of the talk I will discuss rainfall and cloud data over the Indian landmass and how these may be grouped into a few daily spatial patterns by a statistical (Markov Random Field) approach.