Moist turbulent Rayleigh-Benard convection with Neumann and Dirichlet boundary conditions

Turbulent Rayleigh-Benard convection with phase changes in an extended layer between two parallel impermeable planes is studied by means of three-dimensional direct numerical simulations for Rayleigh numbers between 10(4) and 1.5 x 10(7) and for Prandtl number Pr = 0.7. Two different sets of boundary conditions of temperature and total water content are compared: imposed constant amplitudes which translate into Dirichlet boundary conditions for the scalar field fluctuations about the quiescent diffusive equilibrium and constant imposed flux boundary conditions that result in Neumann boundary conditions. Moist turbulent convection is in the conditionally unstable regime throughout this study for which unsaturated air parcels are stably and saturated air parcels unstably stratified. A direct comparison of both sets of boundary conditions with the same parameters requires to start the turbulence simulations out of differently saturated equilibrium states. Similar to dry Rayleigh-Benard convection the differences in the turbulent velocity fluctuations, the cloud cover, and the convective buoyancy flux decrease across the layer with increasing Rayleigh number. At the highest Rayleigh numbers the system is found in a two-layer regime, a dry cloudless and stably stratified layer with low turbulence level below a fully saturated and cloudy turbulent one which equals a classical Rayleigh-Benard convection layer. Both are separated by a strong inversion that gets increasingly narrower for growing Rayleigh number. (C) 2012 American Institute of Physics. [http://dx.doi.org/10.1063/1.4737884]