Insights Into the Effects of Internal Variability, External Variability, and Active Sites on Heterogeneous Ice Nucleation

Heterogeneous ice nucleation (HIN) remains one of the outstanding problems in cloud physics and atmospheric science. Experimental challenges in properly simulating HIN processes with relevant atmospheric conditions have largely contributed to the absence of a consistent and comprehensive parameterization. Here we formulate a new ice active surface site-based stochastic model of HIN with the unique feature of invoking a continuum assumption on the ice nucleation activity (contact angle) of an aerosol particle's surface. The result is a particle specific property g that defines a distribution of local surface ice nucleation rates. Upon integration this yields a full freezing probability function for an ice nucleating particle. Current cold plate droplet freezing measurements provide a great resource for studying the freezing ability of many atmospheric aerosol systems. A method based on statistical significance and critical area analysis is presented that can resolve the two-dimensional nature of the ice nucleation ability of aerosol particles: variability in active sites and freezing rates along an individual particle's surface, as well as variability between two particles of the same type in an aerosol population. When applied to published experimental data, the method demonstrates its ability to comprehensively interpret droplet freezing spectra of variable particle mass and surface area concentrations. By fitting the high concentration freezing curves to a statistically significant active site density function, the lower concentration freezing curves are successfully fitted via a process of random sampling from the statistically significant distribution. Using the new scheme, comprehensive parameterizations that can track the frozen fraction of cloud droplets in larger atmospheric models are derived.