A numerical study of effects of aerosol particles on the electric activities of a thunderstorm with a 1.5D aerosol-cloud bin model

Abstract

Numerical simulations are carried out to study the effects of aerosol particles acted as cloud condensation nuclei (CCN) and ice nuclei (IN) on thunderstorm properties. A two-cylinder time-dependent cloud and aerosol interaction model with the spectral bin microphysical parameterization, explicit noninductive electrification and lightning process is utilized to explore the impacts. This model not only uses the high-resolution particle size bins to describe the distributions of aerosol particles and hydrometeors, but also can be applied to study the diffusional growth of aerosol particles to cloud droplets and to track the mass of both CCN and IN in hydrometeors. The simulated cloud properties show that increased CCN concentrations result in more numerous but smaller droplets and form ice particles less efficiently, producing less numbers of graupel and less efficient conversion to raindrops. Increased IN concentrations directly enhance the heterogeneous nucleation, and then boost the subsequent microphysical processes, contributing to the production of increasingly numbers of graupel which eventually pass through the melting layer and then enhance the precipitation. As CCN concentrations increase, the charge density gained by different mass-binned ice particles and total charge density significantly decrease due to reduced large ice particles with greater diameters than 360 μm. In contrast, as IN concentrations are further increased, dramatically increased large ice particles with greater diameters than 360 μm are produced and thus, support the enhanced charge density gained by different mass-binned ice particles and total charge density. Besides, as expected, the reduced (enhanced) lightning frequency is well explained by the reduced (increased) numbers of large ice particles (diameter>360 μm).