Exploring the Nature of Contact Freezing

The freezing of supercooled water droplets upon contact with aerosol particles (contact nucleation of ice) is the least understood mechanism of ice formation in atmospheric clouds. Although experimental evidences suggest that some aerosols can be better IN in the contact than in the immersion mode (that is, triggering ice nucleation at higher temperature), no final explanation of this phenomena currently exists. On the other hand, the contact freezing is believed to be responsible for the enhanced rate of secondary ice formation occasionally observed in LIDAR measurements in the cold mixed phase clouds. Recently we have been able to show that the freezing of supercooled droplets electrodynamically levitated in the laminar flow containing mineral dust particles (kaolinite) is a process solely governed by a rate of collisions between the supercooled droplet and the aerosol particles. We have shown that the probability of droplet freezing on a single contact with aerosol particle may differ over an order of magnitude for kaolinite particles having different genesis and morphology. In this presentation we extend the study of contact nucleation of ice and compare the IN efficiency measured for DMA-selected kaolinite, illite and hematite particles. We show that the freezing probability increases towards unity as the temperature decreases and discuss the functional form of this temperature dependence. We explore the size dependence of the contact freezing probability and show that it scales with the surface area of the particles, thus resembling the immersion freezing behavior. However, for all minerals investigated so far, the contact freezing has been shown to dominate over immersion freezing on the short experimental time scales. Finally, based on the combined ESEM and electron microprobe analysis, we discuss the significance of particle morphology and variability of chemical composition on its IN efficiency in contact mode.