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The Existential Crisis of Aerosol: Irrelevance to Relative Dispersion of the Droplet Size Distribution?
  • Zhuoqun Hu,
  • Adele Igel
Zhuoqun Hu
University of California Davis

Corresponding Author:[email protected]

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Adele Igel
University of California Davis
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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.