Modeling effect of climate change on the transport processes in Raindrop formation and Lightning

Climate change is an important problem which unless understood and addressed could lead to unimaginable consequences for our planet. The project would take up two important problems of relevance, namely effect of  climate change on formation of rain drops and on the lightning activity. Existing models from literature will be understood and improvised. It is known that aerosols and other particulate matter in atmosphere significantly affect processes such as ice formation up in the atmosphere, rain drop formation under electric fields as well as the atmospheric electric circuit through abnormalities in thunderstorms and lightning phenomenon. Simple chemical engineering and transport based approach would be adopted to get scientific understand  of these processes.

The raindrop formation from tiny droplets up in the atmosphere, under an ambient electric field leads to electro-coagulation process, which is not very well understood. Further, when the droplets grow to sizes of a mm or more, the electric field can significantly affect both the growth and the dynamics of these droplets. It has been conjectured that atmospheric pollution can significantly affect these processes and ultimately affect the rain characteristics. Additionally processes such as frequencies of lightning etc could be related to the growth and dynamics of the droplets up in the clouds. The project would undertake model experimentation and theoretical studies to understand these aspects.