The Existential Crisis of Aerosol: Irrelevance to Relative Dispersion of
the Droplet Size Distribution?
Abstract
The amount of aerosol is a key parameter modulating the cloud
microphysics and its subsequent long-term impact on climate through
Twomey (cloud albedo) effect and Albrecht (lifetime) effect. As the
relative dispersion (ε; standard deviation divided by mean) of the cloud
droplet size distribution is an important factor in controlling the
droplet collision rate and precipitation, along with its relevance in
cloud modeling, it would be valuable to study the influence of aerosol
concentration (Na) on ε. The impact on ε from Na can be observed from
two aspects: intra-cloud and inter-cloud correlation. The intra-cloud
correlation may reveal the cloud microphysical processes that are
affected by the local variability of aerosol concentration, whereas
inter-cloud correlation sheds light onto how different background
aerosol concentration affects the macrophysics of clouds under different
meteorological settings. Past studies that investigated from these two
aspects have shown inconsistent correlation between Na and ε. Hence, the
objective of this study is to identify whether and how the Na affects ε,
observed from these two aspects. In this study, to ensure statistical
significance, we choose five in-situ campaign data sets that were
collected in vastly different places around the world: VOCALS (Chilean
west coast), MASE (California), POST (California, sampling emphasized
near the cloud top), GoMACCS (Texas, emphasized on highly polluted
areas), and ORACLES (Central African west coast). Surprisingly, we
observe that both intra-cloud and inter-cloud Na-ε correlations are
largely nonexistent, whether within individual campaigns or across
campaigns. We also found that the intra-cloud correlation is instead
pronounced only between cloud droplet concentration (Nd) and relative
dispersion, suggesting that the cloud microphysics related to Nd and ε
is not strongly influenced by Na but by other cloud processes. This
strong (negative) correlation could also help models better predicting
relative dispersion from droplet concentration to construct a more
close-to-reality droplet size distribution.