  Numerical weather prediction is pushing the envelope of grid resolution at
local and global scales alike. Aiming to model topography with higher
precision, a handful of articles introduced unstructured vertical grids and
tested them for dry atmospheres. The next step towards effective
high-resolution unstructured grids for atmospheric modeling requires that also
microphysics is independent of any vertical columns, in contrast to what is
ubiquitous across operational and research models. In this paper, we present a
non-column based continuous and discontinuous spectral element implementation
of Kessler's microphysics with warm rain as a first step towards fully
unstructured atmospheric models. We test the proposed algorithm against
standard three-dimensional benchmarks for precipitating clouds and show that
the results are comparable with those presented in the literature across all of
the tested effective resolutions. While presented for both continuous and
discontinuous spectral elements in this paper, the method that we propose can
very easily be adapted to any numerical method utilized in other research and
legacy codes.
