Reply on RC1

Abstract

Large amounts of dust aerosols are lifted to the upper troposphere every year and play a major role in cirrus formation by acting as efficient ice nuclei. However, the relative importance of heterogeneous nucleation and spontaneous homogenous nucleation in dust-related cirrus clouds is still not well evaluated globally. Here, based on space-borne observations, we propose a method to identify two ice-nucleating regimes of dust-related cirrus clouds, i.e., (1) sole presence of heterogeneous nucleation and (2) competition between heterogeneous and homogeneous nucleation, by characterizing the relationship between dust ice-nucleating particle concentrations (INPC) calculated from the Cloud-Aerosol LIdar with Orthogonal Polarization (CALIOP) using the POlarization LIdar PHOtometer Networking (POLIPHON) method and in-cloud ice crystal number concentration (ICNC) from the DARDAR (liDAR/raDAR) dataset. Two typical cirrus cases over central China are shown as a demonstration. In the first case, the upper part (near the cloud top) of a series of cirrus clouds successfully realized the INPC-ICNC closure, meaning that heterogeneous nucleation solely takes place; while the lower part of cirrus clouds showed the possible competition between heterogeneous and homogeneous nucleation. In the second case, the ICNCs in cirrus cloud dramatically exceeded the dust INPCs in the vicinity for more than an order of magnitude, revealing that besides dust-induced heterogeneous nucleation, homogeneous nucleation also participated in ice formation and produced the additional ice crystals. The proposed identification method is anticipated to apply in evaluating the influence of upper-troposphere dust on global cirrus formation and investigating the potential positive role of cirrus cloud thinning in the offset of climate warming.