PNNL

Abstract

Ghan and Easter (2006) (hereafter referred to as GE2006) used a global aerosol model to estimate the sensitivity of aerosol direct and indirect effects to a variety of simplified treatments of the cloud-borne aerosol. They found that neglecting transport of cloud-borne particles introduces little error, but that diagnosing cloud-borne particles produces global mean biases of 20% and local errors of up to 40% for aerosol, droplet number, and direct and indirect radiative forcing However, we have recently found that in those experiments we had inadvertently turned off the first aerosol indirect effect. In the radiation module, the droplet effective radius was prescribed at 10 microns rather than related to the droplet number concentration. The second indirect effect, in which droplet number influences droplet collision and coalescence, was treated, so that the simulations produced an aerosol indirect effect, albeit one that is much smaller (about -0.2Wm-2 for anthropogenic sulfate) than other previous estimates.