Abstract

In the last few decades, fire and smoke-haze occurrence increased in Indonesia by intentionally set land clearing fires and higher fire susceptibility of disturbed forests. Particularly, during El Niño years with prolonged droughts in Indonesia, land clearing fires become uncontrolled wildfires and produce large amounts of gaseous and particulate emissions. This paper investigates the influence of smoke-haze aerosols from such fires on clouds and precipitation over Indonesia during the El Niño event 1997/1998 by numerical modelling. Warm precipitation formation in both layered and convective clouds is calculated dependent on the atmospheric aerosol concentration. In the smoke-haze affected regions of Indonesia, aerosol–cloud interactions induce events with both precipitation suppression and increase compared to a reference simulation without aerosol–cloud interactions. The effect of precipitation suppression is found to dominate with about 2/3 of all precipitation modification events pointing to a prolongation of smoke-haze episodes. The corresponding convective cloud top height of shallow clouds is increased whereas distinct lower deep convective cloud top heights are found. The remaining about 1/3 events are characterised by increased precipitation and cloud liquid water content, accompanied by lower convective cloud top heights of shallow clouds and higher deep convective clouds.

Talk to us

Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have

Schedule a call

Disclaimer: All third-party content on this website/platform is and will remain the property of their respective owners and is provided on "as is" basis without any warranties, express or implied. Use of third-party content does not indicate any affiliation, sponsorship with or endorsement by them. Any references to third-party content is to identify the corresponding services and shall be considered fair use under The CopyrightLaw.