Global Well-Posedness for the Thermodynamically Refined Passively Transported Nonlinear Moisture Dynamics with Phase Changes

Abstract

In this work we study the global solvability of moisture dynamics with phase changes for warm clouds. We thereby in comparison to previous studies (Hittmeir et al. in Nonlinearity 30:3676–3718, 2017) take into account the different gas constants for dry air and water vapor as well as the different heat capacities for dry air, water vapor and liquid water, which leads to a much stronger coupling of the moisture balances and the thermodynamic equation. This refined thermodynamic setting has been demonstrated to be essential, e.g. in the case of deep convective cloud columns in Hittmeir and Klein (Theoret Comput Fluid Dyn 32(2):137–164, 2017). The more complicated structure requires careful derivations of sufficient a priori estimates for proving global existence and uniqueness of solutions.