Understanding Aerosol-Cloud-Radiation Interactions Using Local Meteorology and Cloud State Constraints
- University of Wisconsin-Madison, USA
Abstract. While many studies have tried to quantify the sign and the magnitude of the warm cloud response to aerosol loading, both remain uncertain owing to the multitude of factors that modulate microphysical and thermodynamic processes within the cloud. Constraining aerosol-cloud interactions using the local meteorology and cloud liquid water may offer a way to account for covarying influences, potentially increasing our confidence in observational estimates of warm cloud indirect effects. Four years of collocated satellite observations from the NASA A-Train constellation, combined with reanalaysis from MERRA-2, are used to partition warm clouds into regimes based on stability, the free atmospheric relative humidity, and liquid water path. Organizing the sizable number of satellite observations into regimes is shown to minimize the covariance between the environment or liquid water path and the indirect effect. Controlling for local meteorology and cloud state mitigates artificial signals and reveals substantial variance in both the sign and magnitude of the cloud radiative response, including regions where clouds become systematically darker with increased aerosol concentration in dry, unstable environments. The reverse Twomey effect, as it has been called, is evident even under the most stringent of constraints, confirming it is not an artificial signal or an isolated phenomenon. These results suggest it is not meaningful to report a single global sensitivity of cloud radiative effect to aerosol. To the contrary, we find the sensitivity can range from −.46 to .11 Wm−2ln(AI) regionally.
**How to cite: **Douglas, A. and L'Ecuyer, T.: Understanding Aerosol-Cloud-Radiation Interactions Using Local Meteorology and Cloud State Constraints, Atmos. Chem. Phys. Discuss., https://doi.org/10.5194/acp-2018-1178, in review, 2018.
