← Search

Data · dataset · 2026

The role of in-cloud wet removal in simulating aerosol vertical profiles and cloud radiative forcing

Listed in National Center for Atmospheric Research

Among the physical processes controlling aerosol vertical profiles, in-cloud wet removal is of utmost importance while its representation in global climate models (GCMs) is crude.

Description

In this study, we implement into the Community Atmosphere Model version 6 (CAM6) a physically-based aerosol wet removal parameterization scheme that explicitly treats aerosol activation, removal and resuspension. Evaluation against in-situ observations shows that the default scheme substantially overestimates the upper tropospheric black carbon (BC) and sea salt mass.

Our physically-based scheme reduces BC and sea salt mass by a factor of 10 and 1,000, respectively, in better agreement with observations. Also, the new scheme slightly increases number of aerosol particles between 12 nm and 4.8 mu;m in diameter, thereby mitigating the aerosol number underestimation in the default scheme. Our new scheme reduces the overestimation of coarse-mode aerosol (0.5-4.8 mu;m) number.

Read the rest (2 more)

Overall, the aerosol property changes (mass decrease and number increase) reduce the cloud condensation nuclei (CCN) concentration at low supersaturation (i.e., 0.02% and 0.1%), and increase CCN at high supersaturations (i.e., 0.5% and 1%). Consequently, the global annual mean cloud liquid water path increases by 1.89 g m-2 and the ice water path increases by 0.51 g m-2. The global annual mean shortwave, longwave, and net cloud radiative forcing change by -1.06, 0.57, and -0.48 W m-2, respectively.

Further improvement is needed to reflect the real physics that the removal efficiencies for aerosol mass and number are disproportionate and to advect cloud-borne (activated) aerosols for a complete aerosol lifecycle.

Links

Get the data

Where it is published

Catalogue records · 1

Topics

Inferred from text
Atmospheric sciences 73%
Provenance · 1 source records, 8 field assertions
SourceKeyLast seenRaw
National Center for Atmospheric Research472eea11-9f19-4a69-826c-cf9271f2e3cc13 d agoJSON v1
FieldAssertionExtractorEvidence
concepts[field].anzsrc:group:3701enrichment · data ucar edutaxonomy-embedding@1.1.0title+keywords+description (73%)
concepts[field].local:field:earth-environmentalmapping · data ucar educonnector:data_ucar_edu@1.0.0
concepts[field].local:field:ocean-atmosphericmapping · data ucar educonnector:data_ucar_edu@1.0.0
created_datesource · data ucar educonnector:data_ucar_edu@1.0.0
descriptionsource · data ucar educonnector:data_ucar_edu@1.0.0/notes
publication_datesource · data ucar educonnector:data_ucar_edu@1.0.0
titlesource · data ucar educonnector:data_ucar_edu@1.0.0/title
updated_datesource · data ucar educonnector:data_ucar_edu@1.0.0