Title: Assessment of the Aerosol-Cloud Interaction index by means of lidar and radar simulation
Speaker: Carlos Mario Fajardo Zambrano, Physical Student, University of Granada.
Organizes: Atmospheric Physics Group
Place: Instituto Interuniversitario de Investigación del Sistema Tierra en Andalucía (IISTA). Conference room
Date: December 20th , 2019
Time: 13:00 h
Summary:
The climate change has gained a great interest all around the world, particularly in the European Union, due to its socio-economic impact (reference). For better understanding of future effects, climate projections are required. To do so, physical processes occurred in the atmosphere as well as atmospheric-earth energy balance have been deeply investigated in the last decades. Particularly, the influence of aerosol particles in the cloud formation and microphysical properties, commonly named aerosol-cloud interaction (ACI), has emerged as a research field of special interest since the low-level knowledge causes the largest uncertainties in the climate projections. Despite in-situ experimental approaches have been widely used with promising results, remote-sensing techniques can help to study ACI in real atmospheric conditions by means of synergistic combinations of different instruments. However, low correlations between aerosol and cloud proxies have been found in the literature. This result is likely due to special atmospheric conditions required in order to disentangle the aerosol influence on clouds from others variables such as temperature or water vapor content. The present study aims to assess the stability of the Aerosol-Cloud Interaction index derived from the synergistic combination of lidar and radar measurements by means of the simulation of its signals during a cloud-formation process. This process is parameterized by means of the Hanel and Köhler theories, describing the aerosol-particle hygroscopic growth and activation, respectively.
