PNNL

Abstract

In order to improve the treatment of ice nucleation in a more realistic manner in the Community Atmospheric Model version 5.3 (CAM5.3), the effects of preexisting ice crystals on ice nucleation in cirrus clouds are considered. In addition, by considering the in-cloud variability in ice saturation ratio, homogeneous nucleation takes place spatially only in a portion of cirrus cloud rather than in the whole area of cirrus cloud. With these improvements, the two unphysical limiters used in the representation of ice nucleation are removed. Compared to observations, the ice number concentrations and the probability distributions of ice number concentration are both improved with the updated treatment. The preexisting ice crystals significantly reduce ice number concentrations in cirrus clouds, especially at mid- to high latitudes in the upper troposphere (by a factor of ~10). Furthermore, the contribution of heterogeneous ice nucleation to cirrus ice crystal number increases considerably.Besides the default ice nucleation parameterization of Liu and Penner (2005, hereafter LP) in CAM5.3, two other ice nucleation parameterizations of Barahona and Nenes (2009, hereafter BN) and Kärcher et al. (2006, hereafter KL) are implemented in CAM5.3 for the comparison. In-cloud ice crystal number concentration, percentage contribution from heterogeneous ice nucleation to total ice crystal number, and preexisting ice effects simulated by the three ice nucleation parameterizations have similar patterns in the simulations with present-day aerosol emissions. However, the change (present-day minus pre-industrial times) in global annual mean column ice number concentration from the KL parameterization (3.24×106 m-2) is obviously less than that from the LP (8.46×106 m-2) and BN (5.62×106 m-2) parameterizations. As a result, experiment using the KL parameterization predicts a much smaller anthropogenic aerosol longwave indirect forcing (0.24 W m-2) than that using the LP (0.46 W m-2) and BN (0.39 W m-2) parameterizations.