Stability-dependent increases in liquid water with droplet number in the Arctic

Murray-Watson, Rebecca J.; Gryspeerdt, Edward

doi:https://doi.org/10.5194/acp-22-5743-2022

Articles | Volume 22, issue 9

https://doi.org/10.5194/acp-22-5743-2022

© Author(s) 2022. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

https://doi.org/10.5194/acp-22-5743-2022

© Author(s) 2022. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

Articles | Volume 22, issue 9

Research article

|

03 May 2022

Research article |

| 03 May 2022

Stability-dependent increases in liquid water with droplet number in the Arctic

Rebecca J. Murray-Watson and Edward Gryspeerdt

Supplement

https://doi.org/10.5194/acp-22-5743-2022-supplement

Data sets

The MODIS Cloud Optical and Microphysical Products: Collection 6 Updates and Examples From Terra and Aqua Platnick et al. ttps://doi.org/10.1109/TGRS.2016.2610522

The ERA5 global reanalysis Hersbach et al. https://doi.org/10.1002/qj.3803

Sea Ice Concentrations from Nimbus-7 SMMR and DMSP SSM/I-SSMIS Passive Cavalieri et al. https://doi.org/10.5067/8GQ8LZQVL0VL

AMSR-E/Aqua L2B Global Swath Ocean Products derived from Wentz Algorithm Wentz, F. J. and Meissner, T. https://doi.org/10.5067/AMSR-E/AE_OCEAN.002,

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Short summary

Clouds are important to the Arctic surface energy budget, but the impact of aerosols on their properties is largely uncertain. This work shows that the response of liquid water path to cloud droplet number increases is strongly dependent on lower tropospheric stability (LTS), with weaker cooling effects in polluted clouds and at high LTS. LTS is projected to decrease in a warmer Arctic, reducing the cooling effect of aerosols and producing a positive, aerosol-dependent cloud feedback.