Ice nucleation and growth is an important and widespread environmental process. Accordingly, nature has developed means to either promote or inhibit ice crystal formation, for example ice-nucleating proteins in bacteria or ice-binding antifreeze proteins in polar fish. Recently, it was found that birch pollen release ice-nucleating macromolecules when suspended in water. Here we show that birch...

Recent atmospheric measurements show that biological particles are a potentially important class of ice nuclei. Types of biological particles that may be good ice nuclei include bacteria, pollen and fungal spores. We studied the ice nucleation properties of water droplets containing fungal spores from the genus Cladosporium, one of the most abundant types of spores found in the atmosphere. For ...

Infrared thermography offers a distinct advantage over other methods of studying ice nucleation and propagation in plants because it allows one to directly visualize the freezing process. This technique has provided new details about the freezing process in most of the plant species in which it has been used. It is nonintrusive and thus overcomes any influence on the pattern of freezing resulti...

[1] Several different ice nucleation parameterizations in two different General Circulation Models (GCMs) are used to understand the effects of ice nucleation on the mean climate state, and the Aerosol Indirect Effects (AIE) of cirrus clouds on climate. Simulations have a range of ice microphysical states that are consistent with the spread of observations, but many simulations have higher pres...

The freezing of water typically proceeds through impurity-mediated heterogeneous nucleation. Although non-planar geometry generically exists on the surfaces of ice nucleation centres, its role in nucleation remains poorly understood. Here we show that an atomically sharp, concave wedge can further promote ice nucleation with special wedge geometries. Our molecular analysis shows that significan...

The role of cubic ice, ice Ic, in the nucleation of ice from supercooled water has been widely debated in the past decade. Computer simulations can provide insightful information about the mechanism of ice nucleation at a molecular scale. In this work, we use molecular dynamics to study the competition between ice Ic and hexagonal ice, ice Ih, in the process of ice nucleation. Using a seeding a...

Airborne dispersal of microalgae has largely been a blind spot in environmental biological studies because of their low concentration in the atmosphere and the technical limitations in investigating microalgae from air samples. Recent studies show that airborne microalgae can survive air transportation and interact with the environment, possibly influencing their deposition rates. This minirevi...

In order to improve the treatment of ice nucleation in a more realistic manner in the Community Atmosphere Model version 5.3 (CAM5.3), the effects of pre-existing ice crystals on ice nucleation in cirrus clouds are considered. In addition, by considering the in-cloud variability in ice saturation ratio, homogeneous nucleation takes place spatially only in a portion of the cirrus cloud rather th...