The Impact of Mesoscale Gravity Waves on Homogeneous Ice Nucleation in Cirrus Clouds
Summary (2 min read)
1. Introduction
- Mesoscale air motion variability is crucial for the nucleation of ice crystals in cirrus (see Kärcher, 2017a, and references therein).
- Superpressure balloon (SPB) measurements at altitudes of 18–21 km directly link mesoscale vertical wind speed and the associated temperature variability to gravity waves and quantified spectral properties (Podglajen et al., 2016; Schoeberl et al., 2017).
- Before enhancing complexity by considering effects of heterogeneous ice-nucleating particles (INPs), which are poorly constrained by field observations at cirrus temperatures (<230–235 K; Hoose & Möhler, 2012; Jensen et al., 2018), the authors focus on the more basic and much better understood homogeneous freezing process.
- The authors evaluate statistically microphysical parcel model simulations forced with a large number of different random realizations of fluctuation time series.
2. Stochastic Simulations
- The spectral parcel model primeice solves a large set of equations governing the temporal evolution of heat, water vapor, and supercooled/frozen water during ice nucleation and aqueous aerosol particle and ice crystal growth due to uptake of water vapor (Kärcher, 2017b).
- 2 Geophysical Research Letters 10.1029/2019GL082437 tion between constant updraft and wave-driven vertical wind speed fluctuations, w′ , is somewhat artificial.
- Individual w′ values are sampled randomly from a Laplacian with prescribed standard deviation 𝜎w, or, in terms of adiabatic cooling rates (𝜅), 𝜎𝜅 = 𝛤𝜎w.
3.1. Expectation Values
- The authors performed two additional sets of simulations halving and doubling the mean vertical wind forcing of 10 cm/s. Figure 2 shows the resulting averaged ICNC, 𝜇n(w0) (expectation values).
- The authors would expect the nucleated ICNC to approach a constant value for w0 ≪ 𝜇w, if they just looked at the mean ICNC calculated directly from the updraft speed fluctuation statistic without accounting for sink processes of the ICNC.
- The authors call those values—shown as smooth colored curves in Figure 2—instantaneous ice numbers (equation (S4)).
- Stronger subsidence will make cirrus formation increasingly unlikely due to the rapidly growing separation between the diminishing ice supersaturation and the homogeneous freezing threshold.
- Preferential freezing results from the stochastic nature of the temperature fluctuations.
3.2. Comparison With Observations
- Normalized probability density functions, dP∕dn, represent the fraction of n values that fall into a given number density bin.
- The authors expect differences between these distributions, since the MACPEX data contain ICNCs sampled at various stages of the cirrus cloud, while the parcel simulations only consider nucleated ice crystals.
- Regarding differences in shape, the authors note that the left (low-n) wing of the observed distribution might be affected by sample volume limitations of the measurements.
- If the authors compute the total ICNC directly from instantaneous expectation values, they obtain 𝜇n = 0.09–0.7 cm−3 from equation (S8) for the range of mean updraft speeds prevailing during MACPEX.
- The authors offer two explanations to account for the discrepancy in total nucleated ICNC, which is not entirely unexpected.
4. Conclusions and Outlook
- The authors find that high updraft speed fluctuations increase total nucleated ICNC to much larger values than those calculated deterministically based solely on the probability of occurrence of the fluctuations.
- The overall similarity of the shapes of simulated and analytical statistics suggests that wave-driven dynamical forcing and homogeneous freezing play important roles in in situ cirrus formation, inasmuch as ICNC values >10 cm−3 have been measured in cirrus.
- When including the effects of waves, geographical, seasonal, and topographic variability in updraft speeds should be accounted for.
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Cites background from "The Impact of Mesoscale Gravity Wav..."
...important ramifications for ice crystal nucleation in cirrus (Kärcher et al., 2019)....
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...The short autocorrelation time is responsible for the high frequency variability in CHR influencing ice crystal formation (Kärcher et al., 2019)....
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...Kärcher et al. (2019) report a first attempt to tackle this issue....
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20 citations
Cites background from "The Impact of Mesoscale Gravity Wav..."
...Note, however, that our scheme currently does not include mesoscale gravity waves and might therefore underestimate updraft velocities and ICNC from homogeneous nucleation (Haag & Kärcher, 2004; Jensen et al., 2016; Kärcher et al., 2019; Kärcher & Podglajen, 2019; Schoeberl et al., 2015)....
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References
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"The Impact of Mesoscale Gravity Wav..." refers background in this paper
...Mesoscale air motion variability is crucial for the nucleation of ice crystals in cirrus (see Kärcher, 2017a, and references therein)....
[...]
...The spectral parcel model primeice solves a large set of equations governing the temporal evolution of heat, water vapor, and supercooled/frozen water during ice nucleation and aqueous aerosol particle and ice crystal growth due to uptake of water vapor (Kärcher, 2017b)....
[...]
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Q2. What are the future works in "The impact of mesoscale gravity waves on homogeneous ice nucleation in cirrus clouds" ?
Given the rather long times required for stochastic trajectories to trigger freezing even in air that is already ice supersaturated, future studies should investigate in which situations large-scale cooling, local relative humidity, and INP conditions are most relevant for atmospheric applications. While the effect of such damping is unimportant for the present study, its effect on first freezing times for less ice supersaturated initial conditions and weak or absent large-scale forcing should be studied in future work. The overall similarity of the shapes of simulated and analytical statistics suggests that wave-driven dynamical forcing and homogeneous freezing play important roles in in situ cirrus formation, inasmuch as ICNC values > 10 cm−3 have been measured in cirrus. More importantly, differences between measured and simulated ICNC statistics are consistent with the potential importance of ice crystal sedimentation and INP in cirrus as observed during an aircraft campaign over the continental United States.