EGU22-12632
https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu22-12632
EGU General Assembly 2022
© Author(s) 2022. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

Assessment of ice clouds - aerosol interactions in global satellite observations

Odran Sourdeval1, Edward Gryspeerdt2, Martina Krämer3, and Johannes Quaas4
Odran Sourdeval et al.
  • 1University of Lille, Laboratoire d'Optique Atmosphérique, Physics, Villeneuve d'Ascq, France (odran.sourdeval@univ-lille.fr)
  • 2Space and Atmospheric Physics Group, Imperial College London, London, UK
  • 3Forschungszentrum Jülich, Institut für Energie und Klimaforschung (IEK-7), Jülich, Germany
  • 4Leipzig Institute for Meteorology, Universität Leipzig, Leipzig, Germany

Interactions between aerosols and clouds, as well as their radiative consequences, have been a long-standing problem to understand cloud physics as well as anthropogenic impacts on climate. Satellite-based investigations of the direct and indirect impact of aerosols on liquid clouds have led to significant progress in the understanding during the last decade. This is partly due to the emergence of adapted cloud properties provided by satellites, such as the droplet number concentration. Ice clouds have suffered from such adapted quantity for much longer, but solutions have recently been appearing.

This study investigates aerosol - ice clouds interactions using ice crystal number concentration (Ni) profiles from a lidar-radar dataset (DARDAR-Nice), used cojointly with with collocated aerosol information from the Copernicus Atmospheric Monitoring Service (CAMS) reanalyses. A multitude of cloud regimes, subdivided into seasonal and regional bins, are considered in order to disentangle meteorological effects from the aci signature. First results of joint-histograms between Ni and the aerosol mass show an overall positive sensitivity of Ni to the aerosols load. This response is particularly strong towards to cloud-top and flattens towards cloud-base, consistently with expectations for homogeneous nucleation processes. The response of the ice water content, in terms of adjustment to the initial aerosol perturbation as also quantified.

How to cite: Sourdeval, O., Gryspeerdt, E., Krämer, M., and Quaas, J.: Assessment of ice clouds - aerosol interactions in global satellite observations, EGU General Assembly 2022, Vienna, Austria, 23–27 May 2022, EGU22-12632, https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu22-12632, 2022.

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