1D/2D radiative forcing modelling of a contrail using a Monte-Carlo approach

Contrails affect the radiative balance of the Earth climate (Lee et al., 2021). The representation of contrails characteristics and evolution into climate model remains highly challenging due to the complexity of the microphysical and chemical processes involved into the formation of contrails. The high sensitivity of contrails Radiative Forcing (RF) to the contrails morphology and composition in terms of ice crystal shape, number and size as well as surface temperature and albedo leads to major uncertainty when the RF of contrails is evaluated. In this paper, contrails RF has been modelled using the CEDRE-ASTRE Monte Carlo solver (Tessé and Lamet, 2011) for 1D and 2D idealized representations of a contrail in an atmospheric column (0 - 120 km). The role of the microphysical contrail characteristics have been evaluated using a multiple run sensitivity analysis to key parameters in the determination of contrails RF such as ice crystal size, ice water content, surface albedo and emissivity. A critical analysis of the results is made with comparable studies using different codes (Wolf et al., 2023) and will be detailed in the presentation.

 

References

 

Lee, D.S., Fahey, D.W., Skowron, A., Allen, M.R., Burkhardt, U., Chen, Q., Doherty, S.J., Freeman, S., Forster, P.M., Fuglestvedt, J., Gettelman, A., De León, R.R., Lim, L.L., Lund, M.T., Millar, R.J., Owen, B.,Penner, J.E., Pitari, G., Prather, M.J., Sausen, R., Wilcox, L.J., The contribution of global aviation to anthropogenic climate forcing for 2000 to 2018, Atmospheric Environment, 2021, 244.

Tessé L. and Lamet J.-M., Radiative Transfer Modeling Developed at ONERA for Numerical Simulations of Reactive Flows, AerospaceLab, ed. 2, https://aerospacelab.onera.fr/en/Radiative-Transfer-Modeling-Developed, 2011.

Wolf, K., Bellouin, N., and Boucher, O.: Sensitivity of cirrus and contrail radiative effect on cloud microphysical and environmental parameters, Atmos. Chem. Phys., 23, 14003–14037, https://doi.org/10.5194/acp-23-14003-2023, 2023.