Mechanistic insight into aerosol cooling from perturbed parameter ensembles

Daniel McCoy

University of Wyoming Dept. of Atmospheric Science

Tuesday, Jun 06, 2023, 2:00 pm
DSRC Room 2A305

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Abstract

Uncertainty in the cooling due to aerosol-cloud interactions (aci) in warm clouds dominates uncertainty in inferred climate sensitivity. Two strong contributors to aci-driven cooling are uncertainty related to aerosol, cloud, and precipitation processes and uncertainty related to the preindustrial baseline. Here, we propose new pathways to reducing both sources of uncertainty. We examine present day patterns of cloud properties and consider natural laboratories where precipitation suppression can be isolated. We also consider observations of microphysical properties sampled during a variety of field campaigns to study covariances between aerosol, cloud, and precipitation properties. This has the added benefit of providing high quality aircraft measurements that can be used to evaluate climate models. This is done utilizing a state-of-the-art perturbed parameter ensemble (PPE), configured for the first time to produce output sampled along flight tracks. Constraints on effective radiative forcing due to aci (ERFaci) based on observational constraints are presented