Understanding tiny droplets can make for better weather forecasts

Understanding how small water droplets behave improves our ability to describe evaporation and condensation of water at widely different scales, which has implications for everything from nanodroplets to climate models.

“Water evaporates all the time from oceans, rivers and lakes. Then, clouds form in the atmosphere. Tiny droplets form in the clouds and eventually fall down as rain when they have grown large enough. How quickly these processes occur, how large the clouds become and when the rain falls all depends on how fast mass and energy are transported across water interfaces,” says Øivind Wilhelmsen a research scientist at SINTEF Energy Research.

Some of the uncertainty in current weather forecasts and climate models lies in our fundamental lack of understanding of these transport processes.

Read the interview with Wilhelmsen here.