Frequency of occurrence of rain from liquid‐, mixed‐, and ice‐phase clouds derived from A‐Train satellite retrievals

By J. Mülmenstädt, O. Sourdeval, Julien Delanoë, Johannes Quaas. 2015

323 citations recorded by the source corpus.

A climatology of thermodynamic phase of precipitating cloud is presented derived from global—land and ocean—, retrievals from Cloudsat, CALIPSO, and Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer. Like precipitation rate, precipitation frequency is dominated by warm rain, defined as rain produced via the liquid phase only, over the tropical oceans outside the Intertropical Convergence Zone and by cold rain, produced via the ice phase, over the midlatitude oceans and continents. Warm rain is very infrequent over the continents, with significant warm rain found only in onshore flow in the tropics, and over India, China, and Indochina. Comparison of the properties of precipitating and nonprecipitating warm clouds shows that the scarcity of warm rain over land can be explained by smaller effective radii in continental clouds that delay the onset of precipitation. The results highlight the importance of ice‐phase processes for the global hydrological cycle and may lead to an improved parameterization of precipitation in general circulation models.

Subfields: Atmospheric Science, Global and Planetary Change

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/e12c4eb2b9b2587084f0e500b85ef35bea041813

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Atmospheric Science

1. M. Krämer
2. Ulrike Lohmann
3. Paul R. Field
4. M. Schnaiter
5. J. Crosier
6. P. Lawson
7. S. Abel
8. G. McFarquhar

In Global and Planetary Change

1. Ulrike Lohmann
2. M. Krämer
3. Paul R. Field
4. M. Schnaiter
5. J. Crosier
6. P. Lawson
7. S. Abel
8. G. McFarquhar

Citations in the corpus

• Mixed-Phase Clouds: Progress and Challenges (2017, background): “, Sun and Shine 1994) but also because the development of precipitation (e.g., Field and Heymsfield 2015; Mülmenstädt et al. 2015), and hence the lifetime of the clouds, is controlled by the”
• Overview of Ice Nucleating Particles (2017, background): “(Mülmenstädt et al. 2015), which significantly influences the hydrological cycle and determines cloud lifetime (Rogers and Yau 1989).”