Constraining warm cloud precipitation initiation using aircraft measurements

The initiation of precipitation in warm clouds is a longstanding problem that the community has not made rapid progress in despite great advances in measurement capabilities and considerable investment in conducting observations. One of the primary hurdles is well-known: studying collisional growth is most easily done by observing cloud drops over time (likely for at least tens of seconds). However, nobody has yet devised a method to accomplish this using in situ measurements in real clouds. In this talk, I'll present a handful of ideas of how we can work around these limitations based on studies we have done over the past two decades, including finding variable proxies for time.