References

ACPD

Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics Discussions

ACPD

1680-7375

Copernicus GmbH

Göttingen, Germany

10.5194/acpd-10-763-2010

Longwave indirect effect of mineral dusts on ice clouds

Min

¹ Li

Atmospheric Sciences Research Center, State University of New York, Albany, NY 12203, USA

15 01 2010

10 1 763 783

This is an open-access article ditributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

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In addition to microphysical changes in clouds, changes in nucleation processes of ice cloud due to aerosols would result in substantial changes in cloud top distribution as mildly supercooled clouds are glaciated through heterogonous nucleation processes. Measurements from multiple sensors on multiple observing platforms over the Atlantic Ocean show that the cloud effective temperature increases with mineral dust loading with a slope of +3.06 °C per unit AOD. The macrophysical changes in ice cloud top distributions as a consequence of mineral dust-cloud interaction exert a strong cooling effect (up to 16 w m<sup>−2</sup>) of thermal infrared radiation on cloud systems. Induced changes of ice particle size by mineral dusts influence cloud emissivity and play a minor role in modulating the outgoing longwave radiation for optically thin ice clouds. Such a strong cooling forcing of thermal infrared radiation would have significant impacts on cloud systems and subsequently on climate.

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