We begin by outlining the life cycle of a tall cloud, and thenbriefly discuss cloud systems. We choose one aspect of thislife cycle, namely, the rapid growth of water droplets in ice freeclouds, to then discuss in greater detail. Taking a singlevortex to be a building block of turbulence, we demonstrateone mechanism by which we believe droplets grow rapidly.
This article describes Roddam Narasimha's work on the instability of laminar flow and the subsequent transition to turbulence in boundary layers. I try to explain to the reader why this problem is important and what insights came out of this work. Small portions of this article, not directly about the science, are written in an anecdotal fashion.
