Search results for "clou"
showing 10 items of 830 documents
New investigations on homogeneous ice nucleation: the effects of water activity and water saturation formulations
2022
Laboratory measurements at the AIDA cloud chamber and airborne in-situ observations suggest that the homogeneous freezing thresholds at low temperatures are possibly higher than expected from the so-called “Koop-line”. This finding is of importance, because the ice onset relative humidity affects the cirrus cloud coverage and, at the very low temperatures of the tropical tropopause layer, together with the number of ice crystals also the transport of water vapor into the stratosphere. Both, the appearance of cirrus clouds and the amount of stratospheric water feed back to the radiative budget of the atmosphere. In order to explore the enhanced ice onset humidities, we re-examine…
Effects of ice crystal habit on thermal infrared radiative properties and forcing of cirrus
2007
[1] The impact of assumed ice crystal morphology on thermal infrared (IR) radiative properties of subtropical cirrus is quantified. In particular, the crystal-shape-dependent profiles of downwelling and upwelling thermal IR (broadband and spectral) irradiances and the radiative forcing of cirrus (at the top and bottom of the atmosphere) are investigated. For this purpose, airborne measurements of ice crystal size distribution (in terms of ice crystal maximum dimension) from the CRYSTAL-FACE campaign and a recently published library of thermal IR optical properties of nonspherical ice crystal habits are implemented into radiative transfer simulations. Two cirrus cases are studied in detail: …
A New Look at Homogeneous Ice Nucleation in Supercooled Water Drops
1995
Abstract The classical theory for homogeneous ice nucleation in supercooled water is investigated in the light of recent data published in various physico-chemical journal on the physical properties of supercooled water and in the light of recent evidence that the cooperative nature of the hydrogen bonds between water molecules is responsible for a singularity behavior of pure supercooled water at −45°C. Recent rates for homogeneous ice nucleation in supercooled water drops field from field experiments at the cirrus cloud level and from cloud chamber studies were shown to be quantitatively in agreement with the laboratory-derived lowest temperatures to which ultrapure water drops of a given…
Influence of ice crystal shape on retrieval of cirrus optical thickness and effective radius: A case study
2009
Airborne measurements of spectral upwelling radiances (350A¢Â�Â�2200 nm) reflected by cirrus using the Spectral Modular Airborne Radiation measurement sysTem (SMART)-Albedometer were made over land and water surfaces. Based on these data, cloud optical thickness tau and effective radius Reff of the observed cirrus were retrieved. By using different crystal shape assumptions (hexagonal plates, solid and hollow columns, rough aggregates, planar and spatial rosettes, ice spheres, and a mixture of particle habits) in the retrieval, the influence of crystal shape on the retrieved tau and Reff was evaluated. With relative differences of up to 70%, the influence of particle habit on t is larger th…
The processing of water vapor and aerosols by atmospheric clouds, a global estimate
1995
Recent data published in literature on global cloudiness and precipitation as well as data on updrafts in clouds and their liquid water contents allow us to estimate the global turnover of water vapor and liquid water in the atmosphere. From these turnover rates the global average capacity of clouds to uptake, store and release atmospheric aerosol mass and the rate of wet deposition on the ground was estimated. The results of such an estimate suggest that clouds contribute significantly to the processing of aerosol material in the atmosphere as they constitute an important temporary storage location for it. Although the contribution of aerosol mass resulting from a single evaporation of the…
Approaches to partitioning the global UVER irradiance into its direct and diffuse components in Valencia, Spain
2012
[1] The paper explores methods of partitioning the hourly average UV erythemal flux into its direct and diffuse components for Valencia, Spain. It is shown that the cloud modification factor, the ratio of measured to cloudless erythemal flux relates linearly to the fraction of the measured irradiance that is diffuse. This relationship was developed further into two simple models- a linear and nonlinear one. The models are characterized by an effective cloud cover to partition the global erythemal flux. The diffuse fraction increases linearly with cloud cover in the linear model, but exponentially in the nonlinear one. The models may be used to partition the direct and diffuse irradiance wit…
The effects of different radiation parametrizations on cloud evolution
1997
With the use of the microphysical stratus model (MISTRA), investigations into the effects of variations in the radiative-transfer parametrizations on cloud development have been undertaken. Two radiative-transfer schemes were coupled with the microphysical-thermodynamical section of MISTRA, one based on the exponential sumfitting method and the other based on the correlated k-distribution method of determining gaseous absorption properties. Model runs were initiated with parameter values in accordance with measurements made over the North Sea and comparisons made between model runs where only the radiation schemes were altered. Results indicated that differences between the two schemes had …
Comparison of ERA40 cloud top phase with POLDER-1 observations
2008
[1] A detailed grid-point-based comparison of the cloud top phase derived from the 40-year reanalyses (ERA40) of the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) with satellite measurements is presented. For this purpose an algorithm is implemented to extract a two-dimensional “satellite-like” field of the cloud top phase from ERA40 data. This field is compared with cloud top phase data from the Polarization and Directionality of the Earth Reflectances (POLDER-1) instrument which was in orbit from November 1996 to June 1997. The thermodynamic cloud phase in ERA40 data is parameterized as a function of temperature with pure liquid clouds above 0°C, pure ice clouds below −23°C a…
A multi-model assessment of the impact of sea spray geoengineering on cloud droplet number
2012
Artificially increasing the albedo of marine boundary layer clouds by the mechanical emission of sea spray aerosol has been proposed as a geoengineering technique to slow the warming caused by anthropogenic greenhouse gases. A previous global model study (Korhonen et al., 2010) found that only modest increases (< 20%) and sometimes even decreases in cloud drop number (CDN) concentrations would result from emission scenarios calculated using a windspeed dependent geoengineering flux parameterisation. Here we extend that work to examine the conditions under which decreases in CDN can occur, and use three independent global models to quantify maximum achievable CDN changes. We find that dec…
A numerical model of the cloud-topped planetary boundary-layer: Radiation, turbulence and spectral microphysics in marine stratus
1996
A numerical model of the cloud-topped planetary boundary-layer is presented. The model is one-dimensional with special emphasis on a detailed description of cloud microphysical processes. Aerosols and cloud droplets are treated in a two-dimensional particle-distribution whereby the activation of aerosols is calculated explicitly by solving the droplet-growth equation at all relative humidities. Atmospheric radiation is determined with a δ-two-stream radiation scheme. Turbulent fluxes are parametrized as a function of the turbulent kinetic energy. Numerical results are presented which are obtained by utilizing measurements made over the North Sea. The interaction between radiation, turbulenc…