Caustic Activation of Rain Showers

We show quantitatively how the collision rate of droplets of visible moisture in turbulent air increases very abruptly as the intensity of the turbulence passes a threshold, due to the formation of fold caustics in their velocity field. The formation of caustics is an activated process, in which a measure of the intensity of the turbulence, termed the Stokes number St, is analogous to temperature in a chemical reaction: the rate of collision contains a factor exp⁡(-C/St). Our results are relevant to the long-standing problem of explaining the rapid onset of rainfall from convecting clouds. Our theory does not involve spatial clustering of particles.