0000000000326228
AUTHOR
Paul Lawson
In Situ, Airborne Instrumentation: Addressing and Solving Measurement Problems in Ice Clouds
The workshop on in situ airborne instrumentation: addressing and solving measurement problems in ice clouds, June 25-27, 2010, Oregon, aimed to identify unresolved questions concerning ice formation and evolution in ice clouds, assess the current state of instrumentation that can address these problems, introduce emerging technology that may overcome current measurement issues, and recommend future courses of action to improve our understanding of ice cloud microphysical. Eleven presentations were made covering measurement challenges associated measuring the composition and concentration of all the modes of ice nuclei (IN), measuring the morphology, mass, surface, and optical properties of …
In situ and lidar observations of tropopause subvisible cirrus clouds during TC4
[1] During the Tropical Composition, Clouds, and Climate Coupling (TC4) experiment in July–August 2007, the NASA WB-57F and ER-2 aircraft made coordinated flights through a tropopause subvisible cirrus (SVC) layer off the Pacific Coast of Central America. The ER-2 aircraft was equipped with a remote sensing payload that included the cloud physics lidar (CPL). The WB-57F payload included cloud microphysical and trace gas measurements, and the aircraft made four vertical profiles through the SVC layer shortly after the ER-2 flew over. The in situ and remotely sensed data are used to quantify the meteorological and microphysical properties of the SVC layer, and these data are compared to the l…
Mixed-Phase Clouds: Progress and Challenges
Mixed-phase clouds represent a three-phase colloidal system consisting of water vapor, ice particles, and coexisting supercooled liquid droplets. Mixed-phase clouds are ubiquitous in the troposphere, occurring at all latitudes from the polar regions to the tropics. Because of their widespread nature, mixed-phase processes play critical roles in the life cycle of clouds, precipitation formation, cloud electrification, and the radiative energy balance on both regional and global scales. Yet, in spite of many decades of observations and theoretical studies, our knowledge and understanding of mixed-phase cloud processes remains incomplete. Mixed-phase clouds are notoriously difficult to represe…