The role of in-cloud wet removal in simulating aerosol vertical profiles and cloud radiative forcing

Among the physical processes controlling aerosol vertical profiles, in-cloud wet removal is of utmost importance while its representation in global climate models (GCMs) is crude. In this study, we implement into the Community Atmosphere Model version 6 (CAM6) a physically-based aerosol wet removal parameterization scheme that explicitly treats aerosol activation, removal and resuspension. Evaluation against in-situ observations shows that the default scheme substantially overestimates the upper tropospheric black carbon (BC) and sea salt mass. Our physically-based scheme reduces BC and sea salt mass by a factor of 10 and 1,000, respectively, in better agreement with observations. Also, the new scheme slightly increases number of aerosol particles between 12 nm and 4.8 mu;m in diameter, thereby mitigating the aerosol number underestimation in the default scheme. Our new scheme reduces the overestimation of coarse-mode aerosol (0.5-4.8 mu;m) number. Overall, the aerosol property changes (mass decrease and number increase) reduce the cloud condensation nuclei (CCN) concentration at low supersaturation (i.e., 0.02% and 0.1%), and increase CCN at high supersaturations (i.e., 0.5% and 1%). Consequently, the global annual mean cloud liquid water path increases by 1.89 g m-2 and the ice water path increases by 0.51 g m-2. The global annual mean shortwave, longwave, and net cloud radiative forcing change by -1.06, 0.57, and -0.48 W m-2, respectively. Further improvement is needed to reflect the real physics that the removal efficiencies for aerosol mass and number are disproportionate and to advect cloud-borne (activated) aerosols for a complete aerosol lifecycle.

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Author Shan, Y.
Liu, X.
Lin, L.
Ke, Z.
Lu, Z.
Tilmes, Simone
Gao, L.
Yu, P.
Publisher UCAR/NCAR - Library
Publication Date 2023-09-27T00:00:00
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Topic Category geoscientificInformation
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Metadata Date 2025-07-11T15:14:24.382374
Metadata Record Identifier edu.ucar.opensky::articles:26678
Metadata Language eng; USA
Suggested Citation Shan, Y., Liu, X., Lin, L., Ke, Z., Lu, Z., Tilmes, Simone, Gao, L., Yu, P.. (2023). The role of in-cloud wet removal in simulating aerosol vertical profiles and cloud radiative forcing. UCAR/NCAR - Library. https://n2t.org/ark:/85065/d76t0rqs. Accessed 01 August 2025.

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