Identification

Title

Aerosol indirect effects on glaciated clouds. Part I: Model description

Abstract

Various improvements were made to a state-of-the-art aerosol-cloud model and comparison of the model results with observations from field campaigns was performed. The strength of this aerosol-cloud model is in its ability to explicitly resolve all the known modes of heterogeneous cloud droplet activation and ice crystal nucleation. The model links cloud particle activation with the aerosol loading and chemistry of seven different aerosol species. These improvements to the model resulted in more accurate prediction especially of droplet and ice crystal number concentrations in the upper troposphere and enabled the model to directly sift the aerosol indirect effects based on the chemistry and concentration of the aerosols. In addition, continental and maritime cases were simulated for the purpose of validating the aerosol-cloud model and for investigating the critical microphysical and dynamical mechanisms of aerosol indirect effects from anthropogenic solute and solid aerosols, focusing mainly on glaciated clouds. The simulations showed that increased solute aerosols reduced cloud particle sizes by about 5 μm and inhibited warm rain processes. Cloud fractions and their optical thicknesses were increased quite substantially in both cases. Although liquid mixing ratios were boosted, there was however a substantial reduction of ice mixing ratios in the upper troposphere owing to the increase in snow production aloft. These results are detailed in the subsequent parts of this study.

Resource type

document

Resource locator

Unique resource identifier

code

http://n2t.net/ark:/85065/d7k075x7

codeSpace

Dataset language

eng

Spatial reference system

code identifying the spatial reference system

Classification of spatial data and services

Topic category

geoscientificInformation

Keywords

Keyword set

keyword value

Text

originating controlled vocabulary

title

Resource Type

reference date

date type

publication

effective date

2016-01-01T00:00:00Z

Geographic location

West bounding longitude

East bounding longitude

North bounding latitude

South bounding latitude

Temporal reference

Temporal extent

Begin position

End position

Dataset reference date

date type

publication

effective date

2016-07-01T00:00:00Z

Frequency of update

Quality and validity

Lineage

Conformity

Data format

name of format

version of format

Constraints related to access and use

Constraint set

Use constraints

Limitations on public access

None

Responsible organisations

Responsible party

contact position

OpenSky Support

organisation name

UCAR/NCAR - Library

full postal address

PO Box 3000

Boulder

80307-3000

email address

opensky@ucar.edu

web address

http://opensky.ucar.edu/

name: homepage

responsible party role

pointOfContact

Metadata on metadata

Metadata point of contact