Addressing the difficulties in quantifying droplet number response to aerosol from satellite observations

Jia, Hailing; Quaas, Johannes; Gryspeerdt, Edward; Böhm, Christoph; Sourdeval, Odran

doi:https://doi.org/10.5194/acp-22-7353-2022

Articles | Volume 22, issue 11

https://doi.org/10.5194/acp-22-7353-2022

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

https://doi.org/10.5194/acp-22-7353-2022

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

Articles | Volume 22, issue 11

Research article

|

08 Jun 2022

Research article |

| 08 Jun 2022

Addressing the difficulties in quantifying droplet number response to aerosol from satellite observations

Hailing Jia, Johannes Quaas, Edward Gryspeerdt, Christoph Böhm, and Odran Sourdeval

Supplement

https://doi.org/10.5194/acp-22-7353-2022-supplement

Data sets

MODIS atmosphere L2 cloud product (06\_L2) (Terra) S. Platnick, S. Ackerman, M. D. King, G. Wind, K. Meyer, P. Menzel, R. Frey, R. E. Holz, B. Baum, and P. Yang https://doi.org/10.5067/MODIS/MOD06_L2.061

MODIS atmosphere L2 cloud product (06\_L2) (Aqua) S. Platnick, S. Ackerman, M. D. King, G. Wind, K. Meyer, P. Menzel, R. Frey, R. E. Holz, B. Baum, and P. Yang https://doi.org/10.5067/MODIS/MYD06_L2.061

MODIS Atmosphere L3 Daily Product (Terra) S. Platnick, M. D. King, and P. A. Hubanks https://doi.org/10.5067/MODIS/MOD08_D3.061

MODIS Atmosphere L3 Daily Product (Aqua) S. Platnick, M. D. King, and P. A. Hubanks https://doi.org/10.5067/MODIS/MYD08_D3.061

2B-CLDCLASS product CDPC http://cloudsat.atmos.colostate.edu/data/

MISR Level 2 TOA/Cloud Height and Motion parameters V001 NASA/LARC/SD/ASDC https://doi.org/10.5067/Terra/MISR/MIL2TCSP_L2.001

Modern-Era Retrospective analysis for Research and Applications GMAO https://goldsmr4.gesdisc.eosdis.nasa.gov/data/MERRA2/

ECMWF Reanalysis v5 (ERA5) ECMWF https://www.ecmwf.int/en/forecasts/dataset/ecmwf-reanalysis-v5

Download

Article (4943 KB)
Full-text XML

Short summary

Aerosol–cloud interaction is the most uncertain component of the anthropogenic forcing of the climate. By combining satellite and reanalysis data, we show that the strength of the Twomey effect (S) increases remarkably with vertical velocity. Both the confounding effect of aerosol–precipitation interaction and the lack of vertical co-location between aerosol and cloud are found to overestimate S, whereas the retrieval biases in aerosol and cloud appear to underestimate S.