Effect of Long-Range Aerosol Transport on the Microphysical Properties of Low-Level Clouds in the Arctic

The Arctic region is influenced by elevated concentration of aerosols from mid-latitudes. By acting as Cloud Condensation Nuclei (CCN) and/or Ice Nuclei (IN), these aerosols influence cloud presence and formation, and in turn cloud radiative properties and forcing. We analyze the impact of pollution plumes on cloud microphysical properties, including droplet effective radius and cloud optical depth, by calculating an indirect effect (IE) parameter. This IE parameter is defined by the ratio of relative change in cloud microphysical properties to relative variations in pollution concentrations. We also study the impact of aerosols on the cloud thermodynamic phase. In our study we used three sets of data: (i) A combination of POLDER-3/PARASOL and MODIS/AQUA satellite measurements to retrieve cloud properties, (ii) an atmospheric chemistry transport model GEOS-Chem carbon monoxide tracer for concentrations of biomass burning and anthropogenic pollution plumes, (iii) and reanalysis data from ECMWF for the meteorological state. The pollution plumes from biomass burning sources appear to be good IN, whereas pollution from anthropogenic sources appears to act as better CCN. We extend the analysis to different specific humidity and stability regimes to find that the specific humidity and lower tropospheric stability increase the cloud microphysical sensitivity to pollution loading. For example, for low specific humidity situations the IE parameter is close to zero whereas for the highest values of specific humidity - greater than 5 g kg-1 - the impact of aerosols is a maximum: The IE parameter is up to 0.1 and 0.2 for the effective radius and the optical depth respectively. When the lower tropospheric stability is greater than 25˚K, the IE parameter is approximately 0.3 for the optical depth. We hypothesize that the observed correlation between IE and stability is because cloud formation in the Arctic region is dominated by radiative cooling.