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Efficient In‐Cloud Removal of Aerosols by Deep Convection
Author(s) -
Yu Pengfei,
Froyd Karl D.,
Portmann Robert W.,
Toon Owen B.,
Freitas Saulo R.,
Bardeen Charles G.,
Brock Charles,
Fan Tianyi,
Gao RuShan,
Katich Joseph M.,
Kupc Agnieszka,
Liu Shang,
Maloney Christopher,
Murphy Daniel M.,
Rosenlof Karen H.,
Schill Gregory,
Schwarz Joshua P.,
Williamson Christina
Publication year - 2019
Publication title -
geophysical research letters
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 2.007
H-Index - 273
eISSN - 1944-8007
pISSN - 0094-8276
DOI - 10.1029/2018gl080544
Subject(s) - aerosol , troposphere , convection , atmospheric sciences , environmental science , radiative forcing , cloud base , radiative transfer , convective available potential energy , drop (telecommunication) , sea salt aerosol , climatology , sea salt , meteorology , geology , cloud computing , physics , telecommunications , quantum mechanics , computer science , operating system
Abstract Convective systems dominate the vertical transport of aerosols and trace gases. The most recent in situ aerosol measurements presented here show that the concentrations of primary aerosols including sea salt and black carbon drop by factors of 10 to 10,000 from the surface to the upper troposphere. In this study we show that the default convective transport scheme in the National Science Foundation/Department of Energy Community Earth System Model results in a high bias of 10–1,000 times the measured aerosol mass for black carbon and sea salt in the middle and upper troposphere. A modified transport scheme, which considers aerosol activation from entrained air above the cloud base and aerosol‐cloud interaction associated with convection, dramatically improves model agreement with in situ measurements suggesting that deep convection can efficiently remove primary aerosols. We suggest that models that fail to consider secondary activation may overestimate black carbon's radiative forcing by a factor of 2.