[1] The simultaneous measurements of vertical velocity and cloud droplet size distributions in cumuli collected during the RACORO field campaign over the Atmospheric Radiation Measurement Program’s Southern Great Plains site near Lamont, Oklahoma, US, are analyzed to determine the effects of vertical velocity on droplet number concentration, relative dispersion (the ratio of standard deviation ...

While a large number of field investigations on aerosol CCN activity and cloud microphysics have been performed, very little information on the activation characteristics of the smallest aerosol particles (those close to or below 0.1 μm in diameter) is available. Here we approach the problem in a slightly different way to traditional methods by measuring simultaneously the cloud interstitial pa...

The condensation and evaporation rates predicted by bin and bulk microphysics schemes in the same model framework are compared in a statistical way using simulations of non-precipitating shallow cumulus clouds. Despite other fundamental disparities between the bin and bulk condensation parameterizations, the differences in condensation rates are predominantly explained by accounting for the wid...

Model investigations of aerosol–cloud interactions across spatial scales are necessary to advance basic understanding of aerosol impacts on climate and the hydrological cycle. Yet these interactions are complex, involving numerous physical and chemical processes. Models capable of combining aerosol dynamics and chemistry with detailed cloud microphysics are recent developments. In this study, p...

Abstract The role of clouds for radiative transfer, precipitation formation, and their interaction with atmospheric dynamics depends strongly on cloud microphysics. parameterization microphysical processes in weather climate models is a well‐known source uncertainties. Hence, robust quantification this uncertainty mandatory. Sensitivity analysis to date has typically investigated only few model...

[1] Using the Weather Research and Forecasting model coupled with a spectral-bin microphysics (“SBM”) and measurements from the Atmospheric Radiation Measurement Mobile Facility field campaign in China (AMF-China), the authors examine aerosol indirect effects (AIE) in the typical cloud regimes of the warm and cold seasons in Southeast China: deep convective clouds (DCC) and stratus clouds (SC),...

[1] We present a new algorithm for retrieving optical depth and liquid water content and effective radius profiles of nonprecipitating liquid water clouds using millimeter wavelength radar reflectivity and dual-channel microwave brightness temperatures. The algorithm is based on Bayes’ theorem of conditional probability and combines prior information on cloud microphysics with the remote sensin...

Shallow maritime clouds are critical to regulating the climate of the Earth. Due to their warm cloud top temperatures and extensive horizontal coverage they have a larger net radiative effect at the top of the atmosphere than any other cloud type. In addition to playing a critical role in determining the radiative energy balance at the top of the atmosphere, they are also highly susceptible to ...