Articles | Volume 22, issue 5
https://doi.org/10.5194/acp-22-3391-2022
https://doi.org/10.5194/acp-22-3391-2022
Research article
 | 
14 Mar 2022
Research article |  | 14 Mar 2022

A strong statistical link between aerosol indirect effects and the self-similarity of rainfall distributions

Kalli Furtado and Paul Field

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Cited articles

Ackerman, A., Kirkpatrick, M., Stevens, D., and Toon, O. B.: The impact of humidity above stratiform clouds on indirect aerosol climate forcing, Nature 432, 1014–1017, https://doi.org/10.1038/nature03174, 2004. a, b, c
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Field, P. R., Hogan, R. J., Brown, P. R. A., Illingworth, A. J., Choularton, T. W., and Cotton, R. J.: Parametrization of ice-particle size distributions for mid-latitude stratiform cloud, Q. J. Roy. Meteor. Soc., 131, 1997–2017, https://doi.org/10.1256/qj.04.134, 2005. a
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Short summary
The complex processes involved mean that no simple answer to this question has so far been discovered: do aerosols increase or decrease precipitation? Using high-resolution weather simulations, we find a self-similar property of rainfall that is not affected by aerosols. Using this invariant, we can collapse all our simulations to a single curve. So, although aerosol effects on rain are many, there may be a universal constraint on the number of degrees of freedom needed to represent them.
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