Limitations of passive remote sensing to constrain global cloud condensation nuclei
By P. Stier. 2016
139 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Abstract. Aerosol–cloud interactions are considered a key uncertainty in our understanding of climate change (Boucher et al., 2013). Knowledge of the global abundance of cloud condensation nuclei (CCN) is fundamental to determine the strength of the anthropogenic climate perturbation. Direct measurements are limited and sample only a very small fraction of the globe so that remote sensing from satellites and ground-based instruments is widely used as a proxy for cloud condensation nuclei (Nakajima et al., 2001; Andreae, 2009; Clarke and Kapustin, 2010; Boucher et al., 2013). However, the underlying assumptions cannot be robustly tested with the small number of measurements available so that no reliable global estimate of cloud condensation nuclei exists. This study overcomes this limitation using a self-consistent global model (ECHAM-HAM) of aerosol radiative properties and cloud condensation nuclei. An analysis of the correlation of simulated aerosol radiative properties and cloud condensation nuclei reveals that common assumptions about their relationships are violated for a significant fraction of the globe: 71 % of the area of the globe shows correlation coefficients between CCN0.2 % at cloud base and aerosol optical depth (AOD) below 0.5, i.e. AOD variability explains only 25 % of the CCN variance. This has significant implications for satellite based studies of aerosol–cloud interactions. The findings also suggest that vertically resolved remote-sensing techniques, such as satellite-based high spectral resolution lidars, have a large potential for global monitoring of cloud condensation nuclei.
Subfields: Atmospheric Science, Global and Planetary Change
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/baf71ce6c2fb554eb82fb579464ca60e730cdac6
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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): “For aci,347 the ability of aerosol particles to serve as CCN or INPs depends on the number concen-348 tration, size distribution, solubility, shape and surface chemical properties of the parti-349 cles.”