Aerosol indirect effects on the nighttime Arctic Ocean surface from thin, predominantly liquid clouds.

Lauren M Zamora,Sabine Eckhardt,Ralph A Kahn,Andreas Stohl,Patricia Sawamura,Richard Moore,Allison Mccomiskey

doi:10.5194/acp-17-7311-2017

Abstract

Aerosol indirect effects have potentially large impacts on the Arctic Ocean surface energy budget, but model estimates of regional-scale aerosol indirect effects are highly uncertain and poorly validated by observations. Here we demonstrate a new way to quantitatively estimate aerosol indirect effects on a regional scale from remote sensing observations. In this study, we focus on nighttime, optically thin, predominantly liquid clouds. The method is based on differences in cloud physical and microphysical characteristics in carefully selected clean, average and aerosol-impacted conditions. The cloud subset of focus covers just ~5% of cloudy Arctic Ocean regions, warming the Arctic Ocean surface by ~1-1.4 W m-2 regionally during polar night. However, within this cloud subset, aerosol and cloud conditions can be determined with high confidence using CALIPSO and CloudSat data and model output. This cloud subset is generally susceptible to aerosols, with a polar nighttime estimated maximum regionally integrated indirect cooling effect of ~ -0.11 W m-2 at the Arctic sea ice surface (~10% of the clean background cloud effect), excluding cloud fraction changes. Aerosol presence is related to reduced precipitation, cloud thickness, and radar reflectivity, and in some cases, an increased likelihood of cloud presence in the liquid phase. These observations are inconsistent with a glaciation indirect effect and are consistent with either a deactivation effect or less efficient secondary ice formation related to smaller liquid cloud droplets. However, this cloud subset shows large differences in surface and meteorological forcing in shallow and higher altitude clouds and between sea ice and open ocean regions. For example, optically thin, predominantly liquid clouds are much more likely to overlay another cloud over the open ocean, which may reduce aerosol indirect effects on the surface. Also, shallow clouds over open ocean do not appear to respond to aerosols as strongly as over stratified sea ice environments, indicating a larger influence of meteorological forcing over aerosol microphysics in these types of clouds over the rapidly changing Arctic Ocean.

Highlights

Aerosol indirect effects on clouds are among the biggest uncertainties in climate models (Boucher et al, 2013)
The results suggest that CALIOP would miss ∼ 36 % of slightly polluted air masses (i.e., black carbon (BC) concentrations > 30 ng m−3) at 80 km resolution in nighttime air masses not below another feature
We focused on optically thin (COD < ∼ 3), predominantly liquid clouds collected at nighttime, which we termed ONLi clouds; they cover about 3 % of the nighttime Arctic Ocean (5 % of total non-fog cloudy regions)

Summary

Introduction

Aerosol indirect effects on clouds are among the biggest uncertainties in climate models (Boucher et al, 2013). It is important to reduce these uncertainties in the Arctic, where warming is occurring at a faster rate than in other locations (Serreze et al, 2009), and where local aerosol indirect effects can be large (Garrett et al, 2004; Garrett and Zhao, 2006; Lubin and Vogelmann, 2006; Zhao and Garrett, 2015). > DL –18.9 (–21.8 to –16.0) 5804 –19.3 (–22.3 to –16.1) 19504 –19.3 (–22.9 to –14.8) 800

Methods

Results

Conclusion