CNT Parameterization Based on the Observed INP Concentration during Arctic Summer Campaigns in a Marine Environment

Aerosol–cloud interactions present a large source of uncertainties in atmospheric and climate models. One of the main challenges to simulate ice clouds is to reproduce the right ice nucleating particle concentration. In this study, we derive a parameterization for immersion freezing according to the...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Atmosphere
Main Authors: Ana Cirisan, Eric Girard, Jean-Pierre Blanchet, Setigui Aboubacar Keita, Wanmin Gong, Vickie Irish, Allan K. Bertram
Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
Language:English
Published: MDPI AG 2020
Subjects:
ice nucleation
aerosol–cloud interaction
parameterization
Amundsen campaign
Meteorology. Climatology
QC851-999
Arctic
Online Access:https://doi.org/10.3390/atmos11090916
https://doaj.org/article/c59e8286b72c434f9784605b88cfca96
Description
Summary:Aerosol–cloud interactions present a large source of uncertainties in atmospheric and climate models. One of the main challenges to simulate ice clouds is to reproduce the right ice nucleating particle concentration. In this study, we derive a parameterization for immersion freezing according to the classical nucleation theory. Our objective was to constrain this parameterization with observations taken over the Canadian Arctic during the Amundsen summer 2014 and 2016 campaigns. We found a linear dependence of contact angle and temperature. Using this approach, we were able to reproduce the scatter in ice nucleated particle concentrations within a factor 5 of observed values with a small negative bias. This parameterization would be easy to implement in climate and atmospheric models, but its representativeness has to first be validated against other datasets.

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