Competing effects of aerosol in dictating deep convection, clouds, cloud radiative forcing and thunderstorms

Description

Aerosol has been known to have a variety of effects in affecting cloud, climate and atmospheric dynamics. Sorting out and accounting for these effects are key to cloud and climate modeling. We have tried to tackle these problems from various approaches by extensive data analyses and modeling over regions around the world, most notably the SGP, ARM mobile sites and places of unqiue importance such as China and India where aerosol loading is high and properties are diverse. In general, we found observational evidences that aerosol can alter PBL, atmospheric thermodynamics (CAPE), cloud micro- and macro-physical properties and radiative forcing, as well as their diurnal, even weekly variations. The effects are significantly dictated by aerosol’s optical, microphysical and hygroscopic properties, leading to distinctly different climate effects. Besides, their effects on different components of a deep convective system are so different that make the estimation of their total effects on cloud radiative forcing cumbersome. On the other hand, our preliminary studies using long-term ground (ARM) and global satellite measurements shed some new lights toward narrowing the systematic discrepancies in the estimation of aerosol forcing from forward and inversion approaches. I will give highlights of several ongoing studies on the aforementioned outstanding issues.