A microphysics guide to cirrus clouds – Part 1: Cirrus types
By M. Krämer, C. Rolf, A. Luebke, A. Afchine, N. Spelten, A. Costa, Jessica R. Meyer, M. Zöger, Jessica B. Smith, R. Herman and 6 more. 2015
271 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Abstract. The microphysical and radiative properties of cirrus clouds continue to be beyond understanding and thus still represent one of the largest uncertainties in the prediction of the Earth's climate (IPCC, 2013). Our study aims to provide a guide to cirrus microphysics, which is compiled from an extensive set of model simulations, covering the broad range of atmospheric conditions for cirrus formation and evolution. The model results are portrayed in the same parameter space as field measurements, i.e., in the Ice Water Content-Temperature (IWC-T) parameter space. We validate this cirrus analysis approach by evaluating cirrus data sets from 17 aircraft campaigns, conducted in the last 15 years, spending about 94 h in cirrus over Europe, Australia, Brazil as well as South and North America. Altogether, the approach of this study is to track cirrus IWC development with temperature by means of model simulations, compare with observations and then assign, to a certain degree, cirrus microphysics to the observations. Indeed, the field observations show characteristics expected from the simulated Cirrus Guide. For example, high (low) IWCs are found together with high (low) ice crystal concentrations Nice. An important finding from our study is the classification of two types of cirrus with differing formation mechanisms and microphysical properties: the first cirrus type forms directly as ice (in situ origin cirrus) and splits in two subclasses, depending on the prevailing strength of the updraft: in slow updrafts these cirrus are rather thin with lower IWCs, while in fast updrafts thicker cirrus with higher IWCs can form. The second type consists predominantly of thick cirrus originating from mixed phase clouds (i.e., via freezing of liquid droplets – liquid origin cirrus), which are completely glaciated while lifting to the cirrus formation temperature region (
Subfields: Atmospheric Science, Global and Planetary Change
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/831f778b3cdd2bac9a13c53d665c5a8051f70b07
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In Atmospheric Science
In Global and Planetary Change
Citations in the corpus
- Bounding Global Aerosol Radiative Forcing of Climate Change (2020, background): “…of this effect is1300 small because the primary control on the homogeneous nucleation rate is the in-cloud1301 updraft (DeMott et al., 1997; Lohmann & Kärcher, 2002; Kay & Wood, 2008; Jensen1302 et al., 2013, 2016; Krämer et al., 2016).1303 Some aerosol types are effective heterogeneous INPs.”