Observing Aerosol Primary Convective Invigoration and Its Meteorological Feedback

Abstract

Deep convective clouds (DCCs) play a key role in the global energy balance and water cycle, and produce most tropical rainfall (Koren et al., 2014;Rosenfeld et al., 2008). Adding aerosols can lead to the invigoration of DCCs through enhancing nucleation of smaller but more numerous droplets, as manifested by increased updrafts, colder cloud top temperatures (CTT), longer lifetime and more rainfall (Altaratz et al., 2014;Tao et al., 2012). The first recognized invigoration mechanism is the mixed-phase invigoration, which results from the increased latent heat released by more cloud water freezing aloft due to the suppression of collision-coalescence and warm rain (Andreae et al., 2004;Koren et al., 2008;Rosenfeld et al., 2008). More recently, it has been realized that the added nucleated cloud droplets would lower the vapor supersaturation by enhanced condensation, releasing additional latent heat at low and middle levels, and thus further intensifying convection, named as water-phase invigoration (

Effects of a Vertical Cloud Condensation Nuclei Concentration Explosion in an Idealized Hailstorm Simulation

“…These studies did not use the same parameterization settings, and the vertical distribution of CCN may explain these differences. In the real atmosphere, the vertical distribution of CCN can be influenced by atmospheric pollution and meteorological conditions (Huang et al., 2014; Zang et al., 2023). High emissions of anthropogenic pollutants result in high CCNC below the atmospheric mixing layer (Z. Chen et al., 2020; K. Li, Zhang, et al., 2018), and the abundance of water vapor at low altitudes makes this region likely to have the most significant effect on CCN‐cloud interactions.…”