Large Eddy Simulation Study on Arctic Marine Clouds: the Effect of Aerosol-Cloud Interactions

Dynamics of marine stratocumulus clouds depend on radiative cooling from cloud tops, turbulent transport of moisture and heat from the sea surface, and the availability of atmospheric aerosols to act as cloud condensation nuclei (CCN). These processes and especially aerosol-cloud interactions can be examined with a recently developed Large Eddy Simulation (LES) model UCLALES-SALSA (Tonttila et al., Geosci. Model Dev. Discuss., 2016). Unlike most other LES models, UCLALES-SALSA has fully interactive sectional description for aerosols and liquid and frozen cloud species. UCLALES-SALSA simulations are initialized using atmospheric observations from the Arctic Summer Cloud Ocean Study (ASCOS). First, the model is used to examine the effects of initial total aerosol number concentration on cloud properties. In agreement with several observations, lowering aerosol number concentration decreases cloud lifetime by increasing drizzle and precipitation rates, which further decreases aerosol number concentration. The second test includes comparison between model versions with different microphysics. The new sectional approach seems to produce thicker and more persistent clouds than a two moment model version (Stevens et al., J. Atmos. Sci., 1999) even when the models are tuned to have equal cloud droplet number concentrations. The third part of the study is focused on the effect of ice on cloud properties. Preliminary results indicate that the current cloud case is so warm that the liquid phase dominates, but further studies are ongoing. In general, the results show that cloud evolution depends on aerosol-cloud interactions.