Stratocumulus Cloud Clearings and Notable Thermodynamic and Aerosol Contrasts across the Clear--Cloudy Interface

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Author
Jonsson, Haflidi
Woods, Roy K.
Crosbie, Ewan
Wang, Zhen
Sorooshian, Armin
Chuang, Patrick Y.
Craven, Jill S.
Coggon, Matthew M.
Brunke, Michael
Zeng, Xubin
Flagan, Richard C.
Seinfeld, John H.
Date
2016-03Metadata
Show full item recordAbstract
Data from three research flights, conducted over water near the California coast, are used to investigate the
boundary between stratocumulus cloud decks and clearings of different sizes. Large clearings exhibit a diurnal
cycle with growth during the day and contraction overnight and a multiday life cycle that can include oscillations
between growth and decay, whereas a small coastal clearing was observed to be locally confined with a
subdiurnal lifetime. Subcloud aerosol characteristics are similar on both sides of the clear–cloudy boundary in
the three cases, while meteorological properties exhibit subtle, yet important, gradients, implying that dynamics,
and not microphysics, is the primary driver for the clearing characteristics. Transects, made at multiple
levels across the cloud boundary during one flight, highlight the importance of microscale (;1 km)
structure in thermodynamic properties near the cloud edge, suggesting that dynamic forcing at length scales
comparable to the convective eddy scale may be influential to the larger-scale characteristics of the clearing.
These results have implications for modeling and observational studies of marine boundary layer clouds,
especially in relation to aerosol–cloud interactions and scales of variability responsible for the evolution of
stratocumulus clearings.
Description
The article of record as published may be found at http://dx.doi.org/10.1175/JAS-D-15-0137.1
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This publication is a work of the U.S. Government as defined in Title 17, United States Code, Section 101. Copyright protection is not available for this work in the United States.Collections
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