Efficient in-cloud removal of aerosols by deep convection

Convective systems dominate the vertical transport of aerosols and trace gases. The most recent in situ aerosol measurements presented here show that the concentrations of primary aerosols including sea salt and black carbon drop by factors of 10 to 10,000 from the surface to the upper troposphere. In this study we show that the default convective transport scheme in the National Science Foundation/Department of Energy Community Earth System Model results in a high bias of 10-1,000 times the measured aerosol mass for black carbon and sea salt in the middle and upper troposphere. A modified transport scheme, which considers aerosol activation from entrained air above the cloud base and aerosol-cloud interaction associated with convection, dramatically improves model agreement with in situ measurements suggesting that deep convection can efficiently remove primary aerosols. We suggest that models that fail to consider secondary activation may overestimate black carbon's radiative forcing by a factor of 2.

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Related Dataset #1 : ATom: Merged Atmospheric Chemistry, Trace Gases, and Aerosols

Related Dataset #2 : HIPPO Merged 10-Second Meteorology, Atmospheric Chemistry, and Aerosol Data. Version 1.0

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Copyright 2019 Author(s). This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license.


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Author Yu, Pengfei
Froyd, Karl D.
Portmann, Robert W.
Toon, Owen B.
Freitas, Saulo R.
Bardeen, Charles
Brock, Charles
Fan, Tianyi
Gao, Ru-Shan
Katich, Joseph M.
Kupc, Agnieszka
Liu, Shang
Maloney, Christopher
Murphy, Daniel M.
Rosenlof, Karen H.
Schill, Gregory
Schwarz, Joshua P.
Williamson, Christina
Publisher UCAR/NCAR - Library
Publication Date 2019-01-23T00:00:00
Digital Object Identifier (DOI) Not Assigned
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Topic Category geoscientificInformation
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Metadata Date 2023-08-18T18:24:37.423388
Metadata Record Identifier edu.ucar.opensky::articles:22336
Metadata Language eng; USA
Suggested Citation Yu, Pengfei, Froyd, Karl D., Portmann, Robert W., Toon, Owen B., Freitas, Saulo R., Bardeen, Charles, Brock, Charles, Fan, Tianyi, Gao, Ru-Shan, Katich, Joseph M., Kupc, Agnieszka, Liu, Shang, Maloney, Christopher, Murphy, Daniel M., Rosenlof, Karen H., Schill, Gregory, Schwarz, Joshua P., Williamson, Christina. (2019). Efficient in-cloud removal of aerosols by deep convection. UCAR/NCAR - Library. http://n2t.net/ark:/85065/d7g73hsj. Accessed 13 February 2025.

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