Based on wintertime observations during the MOSAiC expedition in 2019-2020 \cite{Shupe_2022}, it has been found that Arctic cloud properties show significant differences when clouds are coupled to the fluxes of water vapor transport (WVT) coming from upwind regions of sea ice leads \cite{Saavedra_Garfias_2023,saavedragarfias2023}. Mixed-phase clouds (MPC) were characterized by the Cloudnet algorithm using observations from the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Atmospheric Radiation Measurement (ARM) mobile facility and the Leibniz Institute for Tropospheric Research (TROPOS) OCEANet facility, both on board the RV Polarstern . A coupling mechanism to entangle the upwind sea ice leads via the water vapor transport entraintment to the cloud layer has been proposed to successfully identify differences of MPC properties under and without the influence of WVT. For MPC below 3 km liquid water path was found to be increasingly influenced by sea ice lead fraction whereas ice water path was not significantly different in the presence of sea ice leads. However, the ice water fraction, defined as the fraction of ice water path to the total water path, was exhibiting distinguishable asymmetries for cases of MPC coupled to WVT versus decoupled cases. Mainly, the ice water fractions of MPC coupled to WVT were monotonically increasing with decreasing cloud top temperature, while the decoupled cases show increases and decreases in ice water fraction at some specific temperature ranges. The dissimilar behavior of ice water fraction suggests that WVT could importantly influence the processes responsible for heterogeneous ice formation and solid precipitation, therefore coupled MPC and the ice water fraction was also analyzed as a function of snowfall rates at ground. These characteristics are presented based on case studies where WVT back trajectories are available to have a deeper understanding of the interaction processes with sea ice leads that drives the cloud coupled/decoupled differences. Moreover the statistics of our findings based on the whole MOSAiC wintertime period will be put into  consideration.\cite{von_Albedyll_2023}\cite{Shupe_2022}\cite{saavedragarfias2022}

AGU 2023 Session Selection: C014. Coupled-system Processes of the Central Arctic Atmosphere-Sea Ice-Ocean System: Harnessing Field Observations and Advancing Models.