Search results for "CIRRUS"
showing 10 items of 82 documents
NATO ARW on Clouds — Session Summaries
1996
The two papers presented in this session focused on the role of dynamics in the water vapor distribution of the tropics and its implications to climate.
In situ detection of stratosphere-troposphere exchange of cirrus particles in the midlatitudes
2015
Airborne trace gas, microphysical, and radiation measurements were performed during the AIRcraft TOwed Sensor Shuttle - Inhomogeneous Cirrus Experiment over northern Germany in 2013. Based on high-precision nitrous oxide (N2O) and carbon monoxide (CO) in situ data, stratospheric air could be identified, which contained cirrus cloud particles. Consistent with the stratospheric N2O data, backward trajectories indicate that the sampled air masses crossed the dynamical tropopause in the last 3 h before the measurement. These air masses contained cirrus particles, which were formed during slow ascent in the troposphere and subsequently mixed with stratospheric air. From the CO-N2O correlation th…
Contrail ice particles in aircraft wakes and their climatic importance
2013
[1] Measurements of gaseous (NO, NOy, SO2, HONO) and ice particle concentrations in young contrails in primary and secondary wakes of aircraft of different sizes (B737, A319, A340, A380) are used to investigate ice particle formation behind aircraft. The gas concentrations are largest in the primary wake and decrease with increasing altitude in the secondary wake, as expected for passive trace gases and aircraft-dependent dilution. In contrast, the measured ice particle concentrations were found larger in the secondary wake than in the primary wake. The contrails contain more ice particles than expected for previous black carbon (soot) estimates. The ice concentrations may result from soot-…
The Cirrus Coupled Cloud-Radiation Experiment-II
2016
A cirrus study has been undertaken during the second Cirrus Cloud-Radiation Experiment field campaign based in Prestwick, Scotland. We report on a case study describing the radiation and microphysics measurements and cloud modelling work.
Spectral optical layer properties of cirrus from collocated airborne measurements – a feasibility study
2015
Abstract. Spectral optical layer properties of cirrus are derived from simultaneous and vertically collocated measurements of spectral upward and downward solar irradiance above and below the cloud layer and concurrent in situ microphysical sampling. From the irradiance data spectral transmissivity, absorptivity, reflectivity, and cloud top albedo of the observed cirrus layer are obtained. At the same time microphysical properties of the cirrus were sampled. The close collocation of the radiative and microphysical measurements, above, beneath and inside the cirrus, is obtained by using a research aircraft (Learjet 35A) in tandem with a towed platform called AIRTOSS (AIRcraft TOwed Sensor Sh…
The potential of cirrus clouds for heterogeneous chlorine activation
1996
The ER-2 data from ascents and descents through layers of cirrus clouds are utilized to study the heterogeneous reactions of ClONO 2 with H 2 O, of HOCl and ClONO 2 with HCl, and their potential role for the activation of chlorine in the tropopause regions which could affect ozone there. Lacking measured data for the three chlorine containing molecules their abundances as a function of altitude have been calculated from a 2D model. The aerosol surface data measured by a Forward Scattering Spectrometer Probe (FSSP-300) on the ER-2 were corrected for the expected asphericity of cirrus cloud particles by means of a T-matrix method. The results indicate considerable potential of cirrus clouds f…
Subvisible cirrus clouds – a dynamical system approach
2016
Abstract. Ice clouds, so-called cirrus clouds, occur very frequently in the tropopause region. A special class are subvisible cirrus clouds with an optical depth lower than 0.03. Obviously, the ice crystal number concentration of these clouds is very low. The dominant pathway for these clouds is not known well. It is often assumed that heterogeneous nucleation at solid aerosol particles is the preferred mechanism although homogeneous freezing of aqueous solution droplets might be possible. For investigating subvisible cirrus clouds as formed by homogeneous freezing we develop a simple analytical cloud model from first principles; the model consists of a three dimensional set of ordinary dif…
Impact of Crystal Habit on Cirrus Radiative Properties
2007
The impact of assumed ice crystal morphology of subtropical cirrus on the solar and thermal infrared (IR) radiative field above, within, and below the cirrus is quantified. For this purpose airborne measurements of ice crystal size distribution from the CRYSTAL-FACE campaign and a library of optical properties of nonspherical ice crystal habits are implemented into radiative transfer simulations.Two cirrus cases are studied in detail: a high (cold) cirrus cloud with small visible optical thickness (τ≈1), and a lower (warmer) cirrus cloud of relatively large visible optical thickness (τ≈7). For t+he solar wavelength range the impact of shape characteristics of the crystals was important for …
A self-consistent approach to the reflection component in 4U 1705-44
2010
High-resolution spectroscopy has recently revealed in many neutron-star Low-Mass X-ray binaries that the shape of the broad iron line observed in the 6.4-6.97 keV range is consistently well fitted by a relativistically smeared line profile. We show here spectral fitting results using a newly developed self-consistent reflection model on XMM-Newton data of the LMXB 4U 1705-44 during a period when the source was in a bright soft state. This reflection model adopts a blackbody prescription for the shape of the impinging radiation field, that we physically associate with the boundary layer emission. © 2010 American Institute of Physics.
Formulation and test of an ice aggregation scheme for two-moment bulk microphysics schemes
2013
A simple formulation of aggregation for 2-moment bulk microphysical models is de-rived. The solution involves the evaluation of a double integral of the collection kernelweighted with the crystal size (or mass) distribution. This quantity is to be inserted intothe differential equation for the crystal number concentration which has classical form. The double integrals are evaluated numerically for log-normal size distributions overa large range of geometric mean masses. A polynomial fit of the results is given thatyields good accuracy. Various tests of the new parameterization are described: aggre-gation as stand-alone process, in a box-model, and in 2-D simulations of a cirrostratuscloud. …