Search results for "content"
showing 10 items of 1859 documents
Clouds and aerosols in Puerto Rico - a new evaluation
2007
The influence of aerosols, both natural and anthropogenic, remains a major area of uncertainty when predicting the properties and behaviour of clouds and their influence on climate. In an attempt to better understand warm cloud formation in a tropical marine environment, a period of intensive measurements took place in December 2004 in Puerto Rico, using some of the latest developments in online instrumentation such as aerosol mass spectrometers, cloud condensation nuclei counters and a hygroscopicity tandem differential mobility analyser. Simultaneous online measurements of aerosol size distributions, composition, hygroscopicity and optical properties were made near the lighthouse of Cape …
A Theoretical Study of the Wet Removal of Atmospheric Pollutants. Part V: The Uptake, Redistribution, and Deposition of (NM4)4SO4by a Convective Clou…
1995
Abstract The effects of an ice phase on the wet deposition of aerosol particles was studied by means of the authors’ 2D cloud dynamics model with spectral microphysics applied to the Cooperative Convective Precipitation Experiment in Miles City, Montana, on 19 July 1981. The cloud macrostructure as well as the cloud microstructure simulated by the model was found to agree well with observations. Although no on-site observations were available with respect to the chemical composition of the cloud and rain water, the values predicted by the model compared well with typical nearby measurements. The following conclusions can be derived from the model computations: (1) In confirmation of the aut…
A numerical model of the cloud-topped planetary boundary-layer: chemistry in marine stratus and the effects on aerosol particles
1999
Abstract In a numerical study the effect of stratiform clouds on aerosol particles is investigated. This is done with the one-dimensional chemical microphysical stratus model CHEMISTRA. In the microphysical part of the model special emphasis is layed on a detailed description of cloud microphysical processes by means of a joint two-dimensional particle distribution for aerosols and cloud droplets. In the chemical part of the model the particle spectrum is subdivided into three categories referring to unactivated aerosols, small and large cloud droplets. Aqueous-phase chemical reactions are separately treated in the two droplet size classes. Numerical results show that within the boundary-la…
Integrated remote sensing approach to global agricultural drought monitoring
2018
Abstract This study explores the use of the Soil Moisture Agricultural Drought Index (SMADI) as a global estimator of agricultural drought. Previous research presented SMADI as a novel index based on the joint use of remotely sensed datasets of land surface temperature (LST) and normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI) from the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) together with the surface soil moisture (SSM) from the Soil Moisture and Ocean Salinity (SMOS) mission. This study presents the results of applying SMADI at the global scale with a spatial resolution of 0.05° every 15 days. The period of the study spanned from 2010 to 2015. Three spatial scales (local, region…
Improved meteorology and surface fluxes in mesoscale modelling using adjusted initial vertical soil moisture profiles
2018
The Regional Atmospheric Modeling System (RAMS) is being used for different and diverse purposes, ranging from atmospheric and dispersion of pollutants forecasting to agricultural meteorology and ecological modelling as well as for hydrological purposes, among others. The current paper presents a comprehensive assessment of the RAMS forecasts, comparing the results not only with observed standard surface meteorological variables, measured at FLUXNET stations and other portable and permanent weather stations located over the region of study, but also with non-standard observed variables, such as the surface energy fluxes, with the aim of evaluating the surface energy budget and its relation …
The Added-Value of Remotely-Sensed Soil Moisture Data for Agricultural Drought Detection in Argentina
2021
In countries where the economy relies mostly on agricultural-livestock activities, such as Argentina, droughts cause significant economic losses. Currently, the most-used drought indices by the Argentinian National Meteorological and Hydrological Services are based on field precipitation data, such as the standardized precipitation index (SPI) and the standardized precipitation evapotranspiration index (SPEI). In this article, we explored the performance of the satellite-based soil moisture agricultural drought index (SMADI) for agricultural drought detection in Argentina during 2010-2015, and compared it with the one from the standardized soil moisture anomalies (SSMA), SPI and SPEI (at on…
Arctic low-level boundary layer clouds: in situ measurements and simulations of mono- and bimodal supercooled droplet size distributions at the top l…
2015
Abstract. Aircraft borne optical in situ size distribution measurements were performed within Arctic boundary layer clouds with a special emphasis on the cloud top layer during the VERtical Distribution of Ice in Arctic clouds (VERDI) campaign in April and May 2012. An instrumented Basler BT-67 research aircraft operated out of Inuvik over the Mackenzie River delta and the Beaufort Sea in the Northwest Territories of Canada. Besides the cloud particle and hydrometeor size spectrometers the aircraft was equipped with instrumentation for aerosol, radiation and other parameters. Inside the cloud, droplet size distributions with monomodal shapes were observed for predominantly liquid-phase Arct…
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…
Estimation of the spatially distributed surface energy budget for AgriSAR 2006, part II : Integration of remote sensing and hydrologic modeling
2011
In most hydrologic modeling studies, the hypothesis is made that an improvement in the modeled soil moisture leads to an improvement in the modeled surface energy balance. The objective of this paper is to assess whether this hypothesis is true. The study was performed over the winter wheat fields in the AgriSAR 2006 domain. Remotely sensed soil moisture values and latent heat fluxes were used, in combination with in situ observations. First, the land cover and saturated subsurface flow parameters were estimated using the in situ observations. A spatially distributed model simulation was then performed, for which the Brooks-Corey parameters were derived from a soil texture map, and of which…