A two-moment parameterization of aerosol nucleation and impaction scavenging for a warm cloud microphysics: description and results from a two-dimensional simulation

Abstract

A new two-moment warm bulk scheme has been developed including explicitly nucleation and impaction scavenging of aerosol particles as well as all other microphysical processes. The scheme is built upon a quasispectral representation of the aerosol particle, cloud droplet and raindrop distributions. It predicts mixing ratios and number concentrations for each category. Each process is treated explicitly and independently to establish an analytic expression for each contribution for the time-dependant microphysical equations. The scheme has been tested in the dynamical framework of a two-dimensional kinematic model, developed for the Hawaiian Rainband Project (HaRP, 1990). In this frame, the scheme has performed reasonably well compared to the observations as well as to other similar parameterization schemes, and to the spectral model DESCAM. Sensitivity tests demonstrate the great sensitivity of the scheme to the initial aerosol spectrum characteristics. Moreover, they have also shown its capability to calculate nucleation and impaction scavenging and to follow the taken up particle mass in the cloud and raindrop spectra until the deposition on the ground by the rain. Therefore, the parameterization offers a possibility of treating the evolution of the liquid phase of the cloud together with the aerosol particle scavenging. However, due to the severe limitations of a two-dimensional kinematic model, the scheme needs to be further validated in a three-dimensional dynamical model.