New understanding and quantification of the regime dependence of aerosol‐cloud interaction for studying aerosol indirect effects
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Abstract
Abstract Aerosol indirect effects suffer from large uncertainty in climate models and among observations. This study focuses on two plausible factors: regime dependence of aerosol‐cloud interactions and the effect of cloud droplet spectral shape. We show, using a new parcel model, that combined consideration of droplet number concentration ( N c ) and relative dispersion ( ε , ratio of standard deviation to mean radius of the cloud droplet size distribution) better characterizes the regime dependence of aerosol‐cloud interactions than considering N c alone. Given updraft velocity ( w ), ε increases with increasing aerosol number concentration ( N a ) in the aerosol‐limited regime, peaks in the transitional regime, and decreases with further increasing N a in the updraft‐limited regime. This new finding further reconciles contrasting observations in literature and reinforces the compensating role of dispersion effect. The nonmonotonic behavior of ε further quantifies the relationship between the transitional N a and w that separates the aerosol‐ and updraft‐limited regimes.
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