scholarly journals Additional global climate cooling by clouds due to ice crystal complexity

2018 ◽  
Vol 18 (21) ◽  
pp. 15767-15781 ◽  
Author(s):  
Emma Järvinen ◽  
Olivier Jourdan ◽  
David Neubauer ◽  
Bin Yao ◽  
Chao Liu ◽  
...  

Abstract. Ice crystal submicron structures have a large impact on the optical properties of cirrus clouds and consequently on their radiative effect. Although there is growing evidence that atmospheric ice crystals are rarely pristine, direct in situ observations of the degree of ice crystal complexity are largely missing. Here we show a comprehensive in situ data set of ice crystal complexity coupled with measurements of the cloud angular scattering functions collected during a number of observational airborne campaigns at diverse geographical locations. Our results demonstrate that an overwhelming fraction (between 61 % and 81 %) of atmospheric ice crystals sampled in the different regions contain mesoscopic deformations and, as a consequence, a similar flat and featureless angular scattering function is observed. A comparison between the measurements and a database of optical particle properties showed that severely roughened hexagonal aggregates optimally represent the measurements in the observed angular range. Based on this optical model, a new parameterization of the cloud bulk asymmetry factor was introduced and its effects were tested in a global climate model. The modelling results suggest that, due to ice crystal complexity, ice-containing clouds can induce an additional short-wave cooling effect of −1.12 W m2 on the top-of-the-atmosphere radiative budget that has not yet been considered.

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Emma Järvinen ◽  
Olivier Jourdan ◽  
David Neubauer ◽  
Bin Yao ◽  
Chao Liu ◽  
...  

Abstract. Ice crystal submicron structures have a large impact on the optical properties of cirrus clouds and consequently on their radiative effect. Although there is growing evidence that atmospheric ice crystals are rarely pristine, direct in-situ observations of the degree of ice crystal complexity are largely missing. Here we show a comprehensive in-situ dataset of ice crystal complexity coupled with measurements of the cloud asymmetry factor collected at diverse geographical locations. Our results demonstrate that an overwhelming fraction (between 61 and 81 %) of atmospheric ice crystals in the different regions sampled contain submicron deformations and, as a consequence, a low asymmetry factor of 0.75 is observed. The measured cloud angular light scattering functions were parameterized in terms of the cloud bulk asymmetry factor and tested in a global climate model. The modelling results suggest that due to ice crystal complexity, ice clouds can induce an additional cooling effect of −1.12 W m−2 on the radiative budget that has not yet been considered.


2010 ◽  
Vol 10 (12) ◽  
pp. 5449-5474 ◽  
Author(s):  
M. Wang ◽  
J. E. Penner

Abstract. A statistical cirrus cloud scheme that accounts for mesoscale temperature perturbations is implemented in a coupled aerosol and atmospheric circulation model to better represent both subgrid-scale supersaturation and cloud formation. This new scheme treats the effects of aerosol on cloud formation and ice freezing in an improved manner, and both homogeneous freezing and heterogeneous freezing are included. The scheme is able to better simulate the observed probability distribution of relative humidity compared to the scheme that was implemented in an older version of the model. Heterogeneous ice nuclei (IN) are shown to decrease the frequency of occurrence of supersaturation, and improve the comparison with observations at 192 hPa. Homogeneous freezing alone can not reproduce observed ice crystal number concentrations at low temperatures (<205 K), but the addition of heterogeneous IN improves the comparison somewhat. Increases in heterogeneous IN affect both high level cirrus clouds and low level liquid clouds. Increases in cirrus clouds lead to a more cloudy and moist lower troposphere with less precipitation, effects which we associate with the decreased convective activity. The change in the net cloud forcing is not very sensitive to the change in ice crystal concentrations, but the change in the net radiative flux at the top of the atmosphere is still large because of changes in water vapor. Changes in the magnitude of the assumed mesoscale temperature perturbations by 25% alter the ice crystal number concentrations and the net radiative fluxes by an amount that is comparable to that from a factor of 10 change in the heterogeneous IN number concentrations. Further improvements on the representation of mesoscale temperature perturbations, heterogeneous IN and the competition between homogeneous freezing and heterogeneous freezing are needed.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elin Lundstad ◽  
Yuri Brugnera ◽  
Stefan Brönnimann

&lt;p&gt;This work describes the compilation of global instrumental climate data with a focus on the 18th and early 19th centuries. This database provides early instrumental data recovered for thousands of locations around the world. Instrumental meteorological measurements from periods prior to the start of national weather services are designated &amp;#8220;early instrumental data&amp;#8221;. Much of the data is taken from repositories we know (GHCN, ISTI, CRUTEM, Berkeley Earth, HISTALP). In addition, many of these stations have not been digitized before. Therefore,&amp;#160; we provide a new global collection of monthly averages of multivariable meteorological parameters before 1890 based on land-based meteorological station data. The product will be form as the most comprehensive global monthly climate data set, encompassing temperature, pressure, and precipitation as ever done. These data will be quality controlled and analyzed with respect to climate variability and they be assimilated into global climate model simulations to provide monthly global reconstructions. The collection has resulted in a completely new database that is uniform, where no interpolations are included. Therefore, we are left with climate reconstruction that becomes very authentic. This compilation will describe the procedure and various challenges we have encountered by creating a unified database that can later be used for e.g. models. It will also describe the strategy for quality control that has been adopted is a sequence of tests.&lt;/p&gt;


2016 ◽  
Vol 29 (18) ◽  
pp. 6765-6782 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hansi K. A. Singh ◽  
Cecilia M. Bitz ◽  
Aaron Donohoe ◽  
Jesse Nusbaumer ◽  
David C. Noone

Abstract The aerial hydrological cycle response to CO2 doubling from a Lagrangian, rather than Eulerian, perspective is evaluated using information from numerical water tracers implemented in a global climate model. While increased surface evaporation (both local and remote) increases precipitation globally, changes in transport are necessary to create a spatial pattern where precipitation decreases in the subtropics and increases substantially at the equator. Overall, changes in the convergence of remotely evaporated moisture are more important to the overall precipitation change than changes in the amount of locally evaporated moisture that precipitates in situ. It is found that CO2 doubling increases the fraction of locally evaporated moisture that is exported, enhances moisture exchange between ocean basins, and shifts moisture convergence within a given basin toward greater distances between moisture source (evaporation) and sink (precipitation) regions. These changes can be understood in terms of the increased residence time of water in the atmosphere with CO2 doubling, which corresponds to an increase in the advective length scale of moisture transport. As a result, the distance between where moisture evaporates and where it precipitates increases. Analyses of several heuristic models further support this finding.


2014 ◽  
Vol 7 (6) ◽  
pp. 7693-7731
Author(s):  
B. Lebassi-Habtezion ◽  
P. Caldwell

Abstract. The ability to run a global climate model in single-column mode is very useful for testing model improvements because single-column models (SCMs) are inexpensive to run and easy to interpret. A major breakthrough in Version 5 of the Community Atmosphere Model (CAM5) is the inclusion of prognostic aerosol. Unfortunately, this improvement was not coordinated with the SCM version of CAM5 and as a result CAM5-SCM initializes aerosols to zero. In this study we explore the impact of running CAM5-SCM with aerosol initialized to zero (hereafter named Default) and test three potential fixes. The first fix is to use CAM5's prescribed aerosol capability, which specifies aerosols at monthly climatological values. The second method is to prescribe aerosols at observed values. The third approach is to fix droplet and ice crystal numbers at prescribed values. We test our fixes in four different cloud regimes to ensure representativeness: subtropical drizzling stratocumulus (based on the DYCOMS RF02 case study), mixed-phase Arctic stratocumulus (using the MPACE-B case study), tropical shallow convection (using the RICO case study), and summertime mid-latitude continental convection (using the ARM95 case study). Stratiform cloud cases (DYCOMS RF02 and MPACE-B) were found to have a strong dependence on aerosol concentration, while convective cases (RICO and ARM95) were relatively insensitive to aerosol specification. This is perhaps expected because convective schemes in CAM5 do not currently use aerosol information. Adequate liquid water content in the MPACE-B case was only maintained when ice crystal number concentration was specified because the Meyers et al. (1992) deposition/condensation ice nucleation scheme used by CAM5 greatly overpredicts ice nucleation rates, causing clouds to rapidly glaciate. Surprisingly, predicted droplet concentrations for the ARM95 region in both SCM and global runs were around 25 cm−3, which is much lower than observed. This finding suggests that CAM5 has problems capturing aerosol effects in this climate regime.


2016 ◽  
Vol 20 (5) ◽  
pp. 1785-1808 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lamprini V. Papadimitriou ◽  
Aristeidis G. Koutroulis ◽  
Manolis G. Grillakis ◽  
Ioannis K. Tsanis

Abstract. Climate models project a much more substantial warming than the 2 °C target under the more probable emission scenarios, making higher-end scenarios increasingly plausible. Freshwater availability under such conditions is a key issue of concern. In this study, an ensemble of Euro-CORDEX projections under RCP8.5 is used to assess the mean and low hydrological states under +4 °C of global warming for the European region. Five major European catchments were analysed in terms of future drought climatology and the impact of +2 °C versus +4 °C global warming was investigated. The effect of bias correction of the climate model outputs and the observations used for this adjustment was also quantified. Projections indicate an intensification of the water cycle at higher levels of warming. Even for areas where the average state may not considerably be affected, low flows are expected to reduce, leading to changes in the number of dry days and thus drought climatology. The identified increasing or decreasing runoff trends are substantially intensified when moving from the +2 to the +4° of global warming. Bias correction resulted in an improved representation of the historical hydrology. It is also found that the selection of the observational data set for the application of the bias correction has an impact on the projected signal that could be of the same order of magnitude to the selection of the Global Climate Model (GCM).


2009 ◽  
Vol 9 (4) ◽  
pp. 16607-16682 ◽  
Author(s):  
M. Wang ◽  
J. E. Penner

Abstract. A statistical cirrus cloud scheme that accounts for mesoscale temperature perturbations is implemented into a coupled aerosol and atmospheric circulation model to better represent both cloud fraction and subgrid-scale supersaturation in global climate models. This new scheme is able to better simulate the observed probability distribution of relative humidity than the scheme that was implemented in an older version of the model. Heterogeneous ice nuclei (IN) are shown to affect not only high level cirrus clouds through their effect on ice crystal number concentration but also low level liquid clouds through the moistening effect of settling and evaporating ice crystals. As a result, the change in the net cloud forcing is not very sensitive to the change in ice crystal concentrations associated with heterogeneous IN because changes in high cirrus clouds and low level liquid clouds tend to cancel. Nevertheless, the change in the net radiative flux at the top of the atmosphere due to changes in IN is still large because of changes in the greenhouse effect of water vapor caused by the changes in ice crystal number concentrations. Changes in the magnitude of the assumed mesoscale temperature perturbations by 25% alter the ice crystal number concentrations and radiative fluxes by an amount that is similar to that from a factor of 10 change in the heterogeneous IN number concentrations.


2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sara Bacer ◽  
Sylvia C. Sullivan ◽  
Vlassis A. Karydis ◽  
Donifan Barahona ◽  
Martina Krämer ◽  
...  

Abstract. A comprehensive ice nucleation parameterization has been implemented in the global chemistry-climate model EMAC to realistically represent ice crystal number concentrations. The parameterization of Barahona and Nenes (2009, hereafter BN09) allows the treatment of ice nucleation, taking into account the competition for water vapour between homogeneous and heterogeneous nucleation and pre-existing ice crystals in cold clouds. Furthermore, the influence of chemically-heterogeneous, polydisperse aerosols is considered via multiple ice nucleating particle spectra, which are included in the parameterization to compute the heterogeneously formed ice crystals. BN09 has been implemented to operate both in the cirrus and in the mixed-phase regimes. Compared to the standard EMAC results, BN09 produces fewer ice crystals in the upper troposphere but higher ice crystal number concentrations in the middle troposphere, especially in the Northern Hemisphere where ice nucleating mineral dust particles are relatively abundant. The comparison with a climatological data set of aircraft measurements shows that BN09 used in the cirrus regime improves the model results and, therefore, is recommended for future EMAC simulations.


2011 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Mariano Méndez

The motivation of this work comes from a Global Climate Model (GCM) Software which was in great need of being updated. This software was implemented by scientists in the ’80s as a result of meteorological research. Written in Fortran 77, this program has been used as an input to make climate predictions for the Southern Hemisphere. The execution to get a complete numerical data set takes several days. This software has been programmed using a sequential processing paradigm. In these days, where multicore processors are so widespread, the time that an execution takes to get a complete useful data set can be drastically reduced using this technology. As a first objective to reach this goal of reengineering we must be able to understand the source code. An essential Fortran code characteristic is that old source code versions became unreadable, not comprehensive and sometimes “ejects” the reader from the source code. In that way, we can not modify, update or improve unreadable source code. Then, as a first step to parallelize this code we must update it, turn it readable and easy to understand. The GCM has a very complex internal structure. The program is divided into about 300 .f (Fortran 77) files. These files generally implement only one Fortran subroutine. Less than 10% of the files are used for common blocks and constants. Approximately 25% of the lines in the source code are comments. The total number of Fortran source code lines is 58000. A detailed work within the source code brings to light that [74]: 1 About 230 routines are called/used at run time. Most of the runtime is spent in routines located at deep levels 5 to 7 in the dynamic call graph from the main routine. 2 The routine with most of the runtime (the top routine from now on) requires more than 9% of the total program runtime and is called about 315000 times. 3 The top 10 routines (the 10 routines at the top of the flat profile) require about 50% of total runtime. Two of them are related to intrinsic Fortran functions. Our first approach was using a scripting language and Find & Replace tools trying to upgrade the source code, this kind of code manipulation do not guarantee preservation of software behavior. Then, our goal was to develop an automated tool to transform legacy software in more understandable, comprehensible and readable applying refactoring as main technique. At the same time a catalog of transformation to be applied in Fortran code is needed as a guide to programmers through this process.


2010 ◽  
Vol 10 (4) ◽  
pp. 1511-1543 ◽  
Author(s):  
B. Croft ◽  
U. Lohmann ◽  
R. V. Martin ◽  
P. Stier ◽  
S. Wurzler ◽  
...  

Abstract. A diagnostic cloud nucleation scavenging scheme, which determines stratiform cloud scavenging ratios for both aerosol mass and number distributions, based on cloud droplet, and ice crystal number concentrations, is introduced into the ECHAM5-HAM global climate model. This scheme is coupled with a size-dependent in-cloud impaction scavenging parameterization for both cloud droplet-aerosol, and ice crystal-aerosol collisions. The aerosol mass scavenged in stratiform clouds is found to be primarily (>90%) scavenged by cloud nucleation processes for all aerosol species, except for dust (50%). The aerosol number scavenged is primarily (>90%) attributed to impaction. 99% of this impaction scavenging occurs in clouds with temperatures less than 273 K. Sensitivity studies are presented, which compare aerosol concentrations, burdens, and deposition for a variety of in-cloud scavenging approaches: prescribed fractions, a more computationally expensive prognostic aerosol cloud processing treatment, and the new diagnostic scheme, also with modified assumptions about in-cloud impaction and nucleation scavenging. Our results show that while uncertainties in the representation of in-cloud scavenging processes can lead to differences in the range of 20–30% for the predicted annual, global mean aerosol mass burdens, and near to 50% for accumulation mode aerosol number burden, the differences in predicted aerosol mass concentrations can be up to one order of magnitude, particularly for regions of the middle troposphere with temperatures below 273 K where mixed and ice phase clouds exist. Different parameterizations for impaction scavenging changed the predicted global, annual mean number removal attributed to ice clouds by seven-fold, and the global, annual dust mass removal attributed to impaction by two orders of magnitude. Closer agreement with observations of black carbon profiles from aircraft (increases near to one order of magnitude for mixed phase clouds), mid-troposphere 210Pb vertical profiles, and the geographic distribution of aerosol optical depth is found for the new diagnostic scavenging scheme compared to the prescribed scavenging fraction scheme of the standard ECHAM5-HAM. The diagnostic and prognostic schemes represent the variability of scavenged fractions particularly for submicron size aerosols, and for mixed and ice phase clouds, and are recommended in preference to the prescribed scavenging fractions method.


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