H. Gerber

Dynamics and chemistry of marine stratocumulus - DYCOMS II

The second Dynamics and Chemistry of Marine Stratocumulus (DYCOMS-II) field study is described. The field program consisted of nine flights in marine stratocumulus west-southwest of San Diego, California. The objective of the program was to better understand the physics a n d dynamics of marine stratocumulus. Toward this end special flight strategies, including predominantly nocturnal flights, were employed to optimize estimates of entrainment velocities at cloud-top, large-scale divergence within the boundary layer, drizzle processes in the cloud, cloud microstructure, and aerosol–cloud interactions. Cloud conditions during DYCOMS-II were excellent with almost every flight having uniformly overcast clouds topping a well-mixed boundary layer. Although the emphasis of the manuscript is on the goals and methodologies of DYCOMS-II, some preliminary findings are also presented—the most significant being that the cloud layers appear to entrain less and drizzle more than previous theoretical work led investigat...

Rain in shallow cumulus over the ocean: the RICO Campaign

Shallow, maritime cumuli are ubiquitous over much of the tropical oceans, and characterizing their properties is important to understanding weather and climate. The Rain in Cumulus over the Ocean (RICO) field campaign, which took place during November 2004–January 2005 in the trades over the western Atlantic, emphasized measurements of processes related to the formation of rain in shallow cumuli, and how rain subsequently modifies the structure and ensemble statistics of trade wind clouds. Eight weeks of nearly continuous S-band polarimetric radar sampling, 57 flights from three heavily instrumented research aircraft, and a suite of ground- and ship-based instrumentation provided data on trade wind clouds with unprecedented resolution. Observational strategies employed during RICO capitalized on the advances in remote sensing and other instrumentation to provide insight into processes that span a range of scales and that lie at the heart of questions relating to the cause and effects of rain from shallow ...

Nephelometer Measurements of the Asymmetry Parameter, Volume Extinction Coefficient, and Backscatter Ratio in Arctic Clouds

A new instrument, a cloud integrating nephelometer (CIN), was used on the University of Washington’s CV580 research aircraft to measure the asymmetry parameter (g), volume scattering coefficient, and backscatter ratio in clouds in situ and in the visible spectrum during the FIRE-ACE/SHEBA field project in the late spring and summer of 1998 in the Arctic. The principle behind the operation of the CIN is described, and error estimates for the measurements are calculated. The average value of g measured with the CIN in all the Arctic clouds was 0.824, which is slightly less than the value expected for the water-containing clouds that dominated the measurements. The average value of g measured in a glaciated cloud, containing mostly large bullet rosette ice crystals, was 0.737. This relatively small value of g is compared to modeled and indirect measurements of g described in the literature, some of which gave similar small values of g.

Observations of Entrainment in Eastern Pacific Marine Stratocumulus Using Three Conserved Scalars

Abstract Fast measurements of three scalars, ozone, dimethyl sulfide (DMS), and total water, are used to investigate the entrainment process in the stratocumulus-topped boundary layer (STBL) observed over the eastern subtropical Pacific during the second Dynamics and Chemistry of Marine Stratocumulus Experiment (DYCOMS-II). Direct measurement of the flux profiles by eddy covariance is used to estimate the entrainment velocity, the average rate at which the boundary layer grows diabatically via incorporation of overlying free tropospheric air. The entrainment velocities observed over the course of the mission, which took place during July 2001, ranged from 0.12 to 0.72 cm s−1, and appear to outpace the estimated large-scale subsidence as the boundary layer advects over warmer sea surface temperatures. Observed entrainment velocities display only a weak correlation with the buoyancy Richardson number defined at the inversion, which suggests that processes other than inversion strength, such as wind shear, m...

Holes and Entrainment in Stratocumulus

Aircraft flights through stratocumulus clouds (Sc) during the Dynamics and Chemistry of Marine Stratocumulus II (DYCOMS-II) study off the California coast found narrow in-cloud regions with less liquid water content (LWC) and cooler temperatures than average background values. The regions are named cloud holes and are assumed to be a result of water evaporated by the entrainment of dryer air from above the Sc. While such features have been noted previously, this study provided a unique opportunity to investigate in much greater detail the nature of the holes, as well as their relationship to the entrainment rate, because high-speed temperature and LWC probes with maximum spatial resolution of 10 cm were flown together for the first time. Nine long-duration flights were made through mostly unbroken Sc for which conditional sampling was used to identify the location and size of the holes. The holes are concentrated near cloud top, their average width near cloud top is about 5 m, their relative length distribution is nearly constant for all flights, and they can penetrate hundreds of meters deep into the Sc before being lost by mixing. Entrainment velocities at cloud top are estimated from measurements of fluxes of reduced LWC and vapor mixing ratios in holes, the fraction of cloud area covered by holes, and the total water jump between cloud top and the free atmosphere. Rates as large as 10 mm s 1 are found for nocturnal flights, and these rates are about 3 times larger than for daytime flight segments. The rates correlate best with the size of the buoyancy jump above the Sc; the present conditional-sampling approach for measuring the rates gives larger rates than the “flux jump” rates determined by others for the same flights by a factor of about 2. The stability criterion for all Sc predicts thinning and breakup of the Sc, which does not occur. The minimal amount of cloud-top evaporative cooling caused by entrainment contributes little to the top-down convection dominated by radiative cooling during nocturnal flights; however, evaporative cooling caused by the mixing of holes as they subduct with the large-scale eddy circulation in the Sc may contribute, but with an as-of-yet unknown amount.

Horizontal structure of marine boundary layer clouds from centimeter to kilometer scales

Horizontal transects of cloud liquid water content (LWC) measured at unprecedented 4-cm resolution are statistically analyzed scale-by-scale. The data were collected with a Particulate Volume Monitor (PVM) probe during the winter Southern Ocean Cloud Experiment (SOCEX) on July 26, 1993, in a broken-stratocumulus/towering-cumulus cloud complex. Two scaling regimes are found in the sense that two distinct power laws, k−β are needed to represent the wavenumber spectrum E(k) over the full range of scales r ≈ 1/k. Detailed numerical simulations show that the scale break at 2–5 m is not traceable to the normal variability of LWC in the PVMs instantaneous sampling volume (1.25 cm3) driven by Poissonian fluctuations of droplet number and size. The two regimes therefore differ physically. The non-Poissonian character of the small-scale LWC variability is consistent with a similar finding by Baker [1992] for droplet number concentration obtained from Forward Scattering Spectrometer Probe (FSSP) data: at scales of a few centimeters, spatial droplet distributions do not always follow a uniform Poisson law. With β = 0.9 ± 0.1, the small-scale (8–12 cm ≲ r ≲ 2–5 m) regime is stationary: jumps in LWC are highly variable in size and rapidly cancel each other, leading to short-range correlations. By contrast, the large-scale (5 m ≲ r ≲ 2 km) variability with β = 1.6 ± 0.1 is nonstationary: jumps are generally quite small, conveying a degree of pixel-to-pixel continuity and thus building up long-range correlations in the low-pass filtered signal. The large-scale structure of the complex SOCEX cloud system proves to be multifractal, meaning that large jumps do occur on an intermittent basis, that is, on a sparse fractal subset of space. Low-order, hence more robust, multifractal properties of the SOCEX clouds are remarkably similar to those of their First ISCCP Regional Experiment (FIRE) and Atlantic Stratocumulus Transition EXperiment (ASTEX) counterparts, and also to those of passive scalars in fully developed turbulence. This is indicative of a remarkable similarity in the micro-physical and macrophysical processes that determine cloud structure in the marine boundary layer at very remote locales, especially since the particular SOCEX cloud system investigated here was rather atypical. Interesting differences are also found: in the scaling ranges on the one hand, and in higher-order moments on the other hand. Finally, we discuss cloud-radiative effects of the large- and small-scale variabilities.

Homogeneous Ice Nucleation in Subtropical and Tropical Convection and Its Influence on Cirrus Anvil Microphysics

Abstract This study uses a unique set of microphysical measurements obtained in a vigorous, convective updraft core at temperatures between −33° and −36°C, together with a microphysical model, to investigate the role of homogeneous ice nucleation in deep tropical convection and how it influences the microphysical properties of the associated cirrus anvils. The core and anvil formed along a sea-breeze front during the Cirrus Regional Study of Tropical Anvils and Cirrus Layers–Florida Area Cirrus Experiment (CRYSTAL–FACE). The updraft core contained two distinct regions as traversed horizontally: the upwind portion of the core contained droplets of diameter 10–20 μm in concentrations of around 100 cm−3 with updraft speeds of 5–10 m s−1; the downwind portion of the core was glaciated with high concentrations of small ice particles and stronger updrafts of 10–20 m s−1. Throughout the core, rimed particles up to 0.6-cm diameter were observed. The anvil contained high concentrations of both small particles and ...

Evolution of a Florida Cirrus Anvil

Abstract This paper presents a detailed study of a single thunderstorm anvil cirrus cloud measured on 21 July 2002 near southern Florida during the Cirrus Regional Study of Tropical Anvils and Cirrus Layers–Florida Area Cirrus Experiment (CRYSTAL-FACE). NASA WB-57F and University of North Dakota Citation aircraft tracked the microphysical and radiative development of the anvil for 3 h. Measurements showed that the cloud mass that was advected downwind from the thunderstorm was separated vertically into two layers: a cirrus anvil with cloud-top temperatures of −45°C lay below a second, thin tropopause cirrus (TTC) layer with the same horizontal dimensions as the anvil and temperatures near −70°C. In both cloud layers, ice crystals smaller than 50 μm across dominated the size distributions and cloud radiative properties. In the anvil, ice crystals larger than 50 μm aggregated and precipitated while small ice crystals increasingly dominated the size distributions; as a consequence, measured ice water content...

RACORO EXTENDED-TERM AIRCRAFT OBSERVATIONS OF BOUNDARY LAYER CLOUDS

A first-of-a-kind, extended-term cloud aircraft campaign was conducted to obtain an in situ statistical characterization of continental boundary layer clouds needed to investigate cloud processes and refine retrieval algorithms. Coordinated by the Atmospheric Radiation Measurement (ARM) Aerial Facility (AAF), the Routine AAF Clouds with Low Optical Water Depths (CLOWD) Optical Radiative Observations (RACORO) field campaign operated over the ARM Southern Great Plains (SGP) site from 22 January to 30 June 2009, collecting 260 h of data during 59 research flights. A comprehensive payload aboard the Center for Interdisciplinary Remotely-Piloted Aircraft Studies (CIRPAS) Twin Otter aircraft measured cloud microphysics, solar and thermal radiation, physical aerosol properties, and atmospheric state parameters. Proximity to the SGPs extensive complement of surface measurements provides ancillary data that support modeling studies and facilitates evaluation of a variety of surface retrieval algorithms. The five-...

Shortwave, single-scattering properties of arctic ice clouds

The first direct airborne measurements of the asymmetry parameter (g) and extinction coefficient (βext) of clouds are analyzed. The measurements were obtained with a Cloud-Integrating Nephelometer (CIN) in arctic clouds in May and June 1998. The CIN was evaluated by comparing its measurements of the single-scattering properties of water clouds with values from Mie theory using measurements of the droplet size spectra. These results are used to interpret CIN measurements of the single-scattering properties of ice and mixed-phase clouds. For cirrus clouds composed solely of ice crystals the derived value of g was 0.74±0.03 (or 0.76±0.03 if ice crystal faces are assumed to be perfectly smooth and parallel); this value is significantly lower than that calculated assuming the ice crystals to be hexagonal prisms or bullet rosettes. The CIN measurements of βext for cirrus clouds were several times greater than values derived from measurements of the cross-sectional areas and concentrations of the ice crystals. Several possible explanations for the differences between calculated and measured optical properties of the ice clouds are discussed. The measured values of g for mixed-phase clouds depended on the relative concentrations of water and ice. These results are used to show that the albedo of clouds is particularly sensitive to the onset of ice formation. Weak convective clouds and clouds saturated with respect to liquid water generally had higher values of g than those for nonconvective clouds or clouds saturated with respect to ice but subsaturated with respect to liquid water.