PNNL

Abstract

Water vapor amounts in the upper troposphere are crucial to understanding the radiative feedback of cirrus clouds on the Earth’s climate. We use a unique, year-long dataset of water vapor mixing ratio inferred from ground-based Raman lidar measurements to study the role of ice supersaturation in ice nucleation processes. We find that ice supersaturation occurs 31% of the time in over 300,000 data points. We also examine the distribution of ice supersaturation with height and find that in the uppermost portion of a cloud layer, the air is ice supersaturated 43% of the time. These measurements show that large ice supersaturation is common in cirrus clouds, which supports the theory of ice forming homogeneously. Given the continuous nature of these Raman lidar measurements, our results have important implications for studying ice nucleation processes using cloud microphysical models.