Constraining Precipitation Susceptibility of Warm-, Ice-, and Mixed-Phase Clouds with Microphysical Equations

Abstract

Abstract The strength of the effective anthropogenic climate forcing from aerosol–cloud interactions is related to the susceptibility of precipitation to aerosol effects. Precipitation susceptibility d lnP/d lnN has been proposed as a metric to quantify the effect of aerosol-induced changes in cloud droplet number N on warm precipitation rate P. Based on the microphysical rate equations of the Seifert and Beheng two-moment bulk microphysics scheme, susceptibilities of warm-, mixed-, and ice-phase precipitation and cirrus sedimentation to cloud droplet and ice crystal number are estimated. The estimation accounts for microphysical adjustments to the initial perturbation in N. For warm rain, d lnP/d lnN < −2aut/(aut + acc) is found, which depends on the rates of autoconversion (aut) and accretion (acc). Cirrus sedimentation susceptibility corresponds to the exponent of crystal sedimentation velocity with a value of −0.2. For mixed-phase clouds, several microphysical contributions that explain low precipitation susceptibilities are identified: (i) Because of the larger hydrometeor sizes involved, mixed-phase collection processes are less sensitive to changes in hydrometeor size than autoconversion. (ii) Only a subset of precipitation formation processes is sensitive to droplet or crystal number. (iii) Effects on collection processes and diffusional growth compensate. (iv) Adjustments in cloud liquid and ice amount compensate the effect of changes in ice crystal and cloud droplet number. (v) Aerosol perturbations that simultaneously affect ice crystal and droplet number have opposing effects.