The radiative loss from stratus clouds is simulated by the radiative heating of the lower part of a turbid warm layer of water overlying cold clear water. The color change of thymol blue indicator effects the turbidity change between layers and simulates changes in liquid water content between a cloud and the dry air above it. Heat absorption in the lowest level of the turbid layer produces unstable convection through this layer but with important differences from the more familiar cases of convective erosion by bottom surface heating or by convection between rigid surfaces. The experiments suggest that the velocity at which convectively driven entrainment lowers the inversion is scaled by Deardorff's (1970) convection velocity w* (proportional to the 1/3 power of the product of absorbed buoyancy flux times convection depth) and depends only weakly on inversion strenght. The position of the turbidity interface in relation to the temperature inversion exerts a strong influence on entrainment, evidently through the effect of heat absorpted in this predominantly stably stratified region. A study is made of the possibility that the thickness of the absorbing region is determined by the vertical scale of convective penetration of the interface, and the results are applied to determine the rise of an inversion which caps typical stratus cloud. A realistic rate of about 1.5 cm/s is found.