Precipitation susceptibility in marine stratocumulus and shallow cumulus from airborne measurements

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Authors
Jung, Eunsil
Albrecht, Bruce A.
Sorooshian, Armin
Zuidema, Paquita
Jonsson., Haflidi H.
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2016-09-14
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Copernicus Publications on behalf of the European Geosciences Union.
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Abstract
Precipitation tends to decrease as aerosol concentration increases in warm marine boundary layer clouds at fixed liquid water path (LWP). The quantitative nature of this relationship is captured using the precipitation susceptibility (Sₒ) metric. Previously published works disagree on the qualitative behavior of Sₒ in marine low clouds: Sₒ decreases monotonically with increasing LWP or cloud depth (H) in stratocumulus clouds (Sₒ), while it increases and then decreases in shallow cumulus clouds (Cu). This study uses airborne measurements from four field campaigns on Cu and Sc with similar instrument packages and flight maneuvers to examine if and why Sₒ behavior varies as a function of cloud type. The findings show that Sₒ increases with H and then decreases in both Sc and Cu. Possible reasons for why these results differ from those in previous studies of Sc are discussed.
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The article of record as published may be located at http://dx.doi.org/10.5194/acp-16-11395-2016
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ONR grants N000140810465, N00014-10-1-0811, N00014-16-1-2567, and NSF grant AGS-1008848.
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Jung, E., Albrecht, B. A., Sorooshian, A., Zuidema, P., and Jonsson, H. H.: Precipitation susceptibility in marine stratocumulus and shallow cumulus from airborne measurements, Atmos. Chem. Phys., 16, 11395-11413, doi:10.5194/acp-16-11395-2016, 2016.
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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.
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