Articles | Volume 16, issue 5
https://doi.org/10.5194/acp-16-3463-2016
https://doi.org/10.5194/acp-16-3463-2016
Research article
 | 
16 Mar 2016
Research article |  | 16 Mar 2016

A microphysics guide to cirrus clouds – Part 1: Cirrus types

Martina Krämer, Christian Rolf, Anna Luebke, Armin Afchine, Nicole Spelten, Anja Costa, Jessica Meyer, Martin Zöger, Jessica Smith, Robert L. Herman, Bernhard Buchholz, Volker Ebert, Darrel Baumgardner, Stephan Borrmann, Marcus Klingebiel, and Linnea Avallone

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Cited articles

Archuleta, C. M., DeMott, P. J., and Kreidenweis, S. M.: Ice nucleation by surrogates for atmospheric mineral dust and mineral dust/sulfate particles at cirrus temperatures, Atmos. Chem. Phys., 5, 2617–2634, https://doi.org/10.5194/acp-5-2617-2005, 2005.
Baumgardner, D., Jonsson, H., Dawson, W., O'Connor, D., and Newton, R.: The cloud, aerosol and precipitation spectrometer (CAPS): a new instrument for cloud investigations, Atmos. Res., 59–60, 251–264, 2001.
Boucher, O., Randall, D., Artaxo, P., Bretherton, C., Feingold, G., Forster, P., Kerminen, V.-M., Kondo, Y., Liao, H., Lohmann, U., Rasch, P., Satheesh, S., Sherwood, S., Stevens, B., and Zhang, X.: Clouds and Aerosols, in: Climate Change 2013: The Physical Science Basis, Contribution of Working Group I to the Fifth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, edited by: Stocker, T. F., Qin, D., Plattner, G.-K., Tignor, M., Allen, S. K., Boschung, J., Nauels, A., Xia, Y., Bex, V., and Midgley, P. M., Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, United Kingdom and New York, NY, USA, 2013.
Buchholz, B., Kühnreich, B., Smit, H. G. J., and Ebert, V.: Validation of an extractive, airborne, compact TDL spectrometer for atmospheric humidity sensing by blind intercomparison, Appl. Phys. B – Lasers O., 110, 249–262, 2013.
Bunz, H., Benz, S., Gensch, I., and Krämer, M.: MAID: a model to simulate UT/LS aerosols and ice clouds, Environ. Res. Lett., 3, 035001, https://doi.org/10.1088/1748-9326/3/3/035001, 2008.
Short summary
A guide to cirrus clouds is compiled from extensive model simulations and aircraft observations. Two types of cirrus are found: rather thin in situ cirrus that form directly as ice and thicker liquid origin cirrus consisting of uplifted frozen liquid drops. Over Europe, thinner in situ and liquid origin cirrus occur often together with frontal systems, while over the US and the Tropics, thick liquid origin cirrus formed in large convective systems are detected more frequently.
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