Search

A closed-cell marine stratocumulus case during the Aerosol and Cloud Experiments in the Eastern North Atlantic (ACE-ENA) aircraft field campaign is selected to examine the heterogeneities of cloud and drizzle microphysical properties and the aerosol-cloud-precipitation interactions. The spatial and vertical variabilities of cloud and drizzle microphysics are found in two different sets of flight legs: Leg-1 and Leg-2, which are parallel and perpendicular to the cloud propagation, respectively. The cloud along Leg-2 was close to adiabatic, where cloud-droplet effective radius and liquid water content linearly increase from cloud base to cloud top with less drizzle. The cloud along Leg-1 was sub-adiabatic with lower cloud-droplet number concentration and larger cloud-droplet effective, but higher drizzle droplet number concentration, larger drizzle droplet median diameter and drizzle liquid water content. The heavier drizzle frequency and intensity on Leg-1 were enhanced by the collision-coalescence processes within cloud due to strong turbulence. The sub-cloud precipitation rate on Leg-1 was significantly higher than that along Leg-2. As a result, the sub-cloud accumulation mode aerosols and CCN on Leg-1 were depleted, but the coarse model aerosols increased. This further leads to a counter-intuitive phenomenon that the CCN is less than cloud-droplet number concentration for Leg-1. The average CCN loss rates are −3.89 cm−3 h−1 and −0.77 cm−3 h−1 on Leg-1 and Leg-2, respectively. The cloud and drizzle heterogeneities inside the same stratocumulus can significantly alter the sub-cloud aerosols and CCN budget. Hence it should be treated with caution in the aircraft assessment of aerosol-cloud-precipitation interactions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A detailed microphysical characterization is presented for aerosol spectra over three major areas over Greece, namely- the Area West of Crete (AWC), the Greater Thessaloniki area (GTA) and the Greater Athens Area (GAA) based on measurements made by Varotsos (2005). Aerosol size distributions along with cloud droplet concentrations were gathered from data collected from the Forward Scattering Spectrometer Probe (FSSP)-300 and Passive Cavity Aerosol Spectrometer Probe (PCASP)-100X flown on a Falcon aircraft over Greece (Varotsos, 2005). However, the microphysical and dynamical characterisation of the observations were left largely unexplored (for this later paper), particularly with regard to their growth and activation into cloud condensation nuclei. A suite of models involving Large Eddy Simulations and an Adiabatic Parcel Model were used to achieve this. The UK Met Office large eddy model (LEM) reveals that mild to moderate updraughts in the range of 0.5 ms-1 to 2 ms-1 were present over Athens during June 1997, over the regions containing the aerosol bands. The sophisticated parcel model was then been applied to this data to study the growth of aerosol in the updraughts present and further, to explore the possibility of rainfall. It is found that the grown droplets have radii spanning a range of 6 μm to 100 μm indicating a hundredfold increase over initial size and the region spanning height from 2700 to 3000 meters contains precipitable water.

A detailed microphysical characterization is presented for aerosol spectra over three major areas over Greece, namely- the Area West of Crete (AWC), the Greater Thessaloniki area (GTA) and the Greater Athens Area (GAA) based on measurements made by Varotsos (2005). Aerosol size distributions along with cloud droplet concentrations were gathered from data collected from the Forward Scattering Spectrometer Probe (FSSP)-300 and Passive Cavity Aerosol Spectrometer Probe (PCASP)-100X flown on a Falcon aircraft over Greece (Varotsos, 2005). However, the microphysical and dynamical characterisation of the observations were left largely unexplored (for this later paper), particularly with regard to their growth and activation into cloud condensation nuclei. A suite of models involving Large Eddy Simulations and an Adiabatic Parcel Model were used to achieve this. The UK Met Office large eddy model (LEM) reveals that mild to moderate updraughts in the range of 0.5 ms-1 to 2 ms ≈ were present over Athens during June 1997, over the regions containing the aerosol bands. The sophisticated parcel model was then been applied to this data to study the growth of aerosol in the updraughts present and further, to explore the possibility of rainfall. It is found that the grown droplets have radii spanning a range of 6 µm to 100 µm indicating a hundredfold increase over initial size and the region spanning height from 2700 to 3000 meters contains precipitable water. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]