[1] Aerosols are a critical factor in the atmospheric hydrological cycle and radiation budget. As a major agent for clouds to form and a significant attenuator of solar radiation, aerosols affect climate in several ways. Current research suggests that aerosol effects on clouds could further extend to precipitation, both through the formation of cloud particles and by exerting persistent radiati...

One problem in computing cloud microphysical processes in coarse-resolution numerical models is that many microphysical processes are nonlinear and small in scale. Consequently, there are inaccuracies if microphysics parameterizations are forced with grid box averages of model fields, such as liquid water content. Rather, the model needs to determine information about subgrid variability and in...

[1] Surfactants often found in tropospheric aerosols, can affect the onset and development of clouds. Due to high dilution during droplet growth, the effects of surfactants on cloud microphysical processes have been mostly neglected. However, while cloud growth by coalescence conserves the combined volume of all cloud droplets, it reduces the combined surface area. This could lead to enrichment...

This paper presents a range of applications of the Regional Atmospheric Modeling System (RAMS), a comprehensive mesoscale meteorological modeling system. Applications discussed in this paper include large eddy simulations (LES) and simulations of thunderstorms, cumulus fields, mesoscale convective systems, mid-latitude cirrus clouds, winter storms, mechanicallyand thermally-forced mesoscale sys...

The Lin-hail microphysics scheme is based on Lin et al. (1983) as modified by the Goddard Cumulus Ensemble Modeling Group (Tao and Simpson, 1993; Braun and Tao, 2000). It includes six classes of water species representing water vapor, cloud water, cloud ice, rain, snow and hail. The size distributions of the precipitating species (rain, snow and hail) are assumed to follow an exponential distri...

The method of moments (MOM) provides a highly efficient approach to tracking particle populations, be they aerosols or cloud droplets. In the case of aerosols the method is a statistically based alternative to bin-sectional and modal approaches [Wright et al., 2000]. In the case of clouds, where moments are often the desired product of a simulation for comparisons with radar and satellite obser...

We developed a new algorithm to retrieve properties of non-precipitating liquid water clouds from millimeter wave radar and Microwave Radiometer (MWR) data using Bayes’ theorem of conditional probability. Bayes’ theorem relates the inverse problem (retrieving cloud properties from remotesensing observations) to the forward problem (modeling remote-sensing observations given a set of cloud prope...

Mixing of air containing small water droplets is investigated in the laboratory model to elucidate smallest scales of air entrainment and mixing in real clouds. Particle Image Velocimetry (PIV) is applied to evaluate turbulent characteristics of the flow field generated in the cloud chamber by buoyancy of the introduced mist. It permits to investigate dynamics of the process for scales from 0.0...

A weekly cycle in aerosol pollution and some meteorological quantities is observed over Europe. In the present study we exploit this effect to analyse aerosol-cloudradiation interactions. A weekly cycle is imposed on anthropogenic emissions in two general circulation models that include parameterizations of aerosol processes and cloud microphysics. It is found that the simulated weekly cycles i...