Dave Raymond and the "Elementary Particles" of Atmospheric Convection (Invited Presentation)

Dave Raymond began his career in physics studying elementary particles. Dave began his career in atmospheric science studying the ‘elementary particles’ of atmospheric convection. In this talk I will review Dave's observational and experimental contributions to our understanding of the basic building blocks of atmospheric convection. In what has become Dave’s hallmark style of starting with simple, and progressively moving to more complex, physical systems, Dave in a series of papers (with M. H. Wilkening) documented and analyzed the structure of convection as it occurs in his `backyard'---the mountains of New Mexico. Progressing from dry convection to moist, shallow and then to moist, deep, precipitating convection, these studies provide the bedrock knowledge of how turbulent atmospheric convection behaves. In a related study, Dave and colleagues engineered a unique laboratory experiment on atmospheric thermals, in which the starting buoyancy anomaly was created to Platonic perfection.