Contrails and Their Impact on Shortwave Radiation and Photovoltaic Power Production – A Regional Model Study

Gruber, Simon; Unterstraßer, Simon; Bechtold, Jan; Vogel, H.; Vogel, Bernhard; Jung, Martin; Pak, Henry

doi:10.5194/acp-2017-878

Cited by 2 publications

(2 citation statements)

References 38 publications

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“…To obtain an average height profile, a spin‐up simulation of 2 weeks was performed, where deployment of the aerosol took place alongside aircraft trajectories at cruise altitude throughout the Northern Hemisphere. The trajectories were obtained using traffic way point information from Automatic Dependent Surveillance‐Broadcast transponders on commercial airliners according to the method described in Gruber et al ().…”

Section: Influence Of Seedingmentioning

confidence: 99%

A Process Study on Thinning of Arctic Winter Cirrus Clouds With High‐Resolution ICON‐ART Simulations

et al. 2019

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In this study, cloud‐resolving simulations of a case study for a limited area of the hibernal Arctic were performed with the atmospheric modeling system ICON‐ART (ICOsahedral Nonhydrostatic‐Aerosol and Reactive Trace gases). A thorough comparison with data both from satellite as well as aircraft measurement is presented to validate the simulations. In addition, the model is applied to clarify the microphysical processes occurring when introducing artificial aerosol particles into the upper troposphere with the aim of modifying cirrus clouds in the framework of climate engineering. Former modeling studies investigating the climate effect of this method were performed with simplifying assumptions and much coarser resolution, reaching partly contradicting conclusions concerning the method's effectiveness. The primary effect of seeding is found to be a reduction of ice crystal number concentrations in cirrus clouds, leading to increased outgoing longwave radiative fluxes at the top of the atmosphere, thereby creating a cooling effect. Furthermore, a secondary effect is found, as ice crystals formed from the injected seeding aerosol particles lead to enhanced riming of cloud droplets within the planetary boundary layer. This effectively reduces the coverage of mixed‐phase clouds, thus generating additional cooling by increased upward longwave radiative fluxes at the surface. The efficacy of seeding cirrus clouds proves to be relatively independent from the atmospheric background conditions, scales with the number concentrations of seeding particles, and is highest for large aerosol particles.

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Section: Influence Of Seedingmentioning

confidence: 99%

A Process Study on Thinning of Arctic Winter Cirrus Clouds With High‐Resolution ICON‐ART Simulations

et al. 2019

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“…Modeling the life cycle of contrail cirrus, just as modeling natural clouds, involves processes on a large range of scales, comprising microphysical processes as well as large-scale dynamics. Different approaches have been used, ranging from simulating single contrails over parts or the whole life cycle in a large-eddy simulation (LES; e.g., Lewellen et al, 2014;Unterstrasser, 2014;Paoli and Shariff, 2016) or numerical weather prediction (NWP; Gruber et al, 2018) to simulating the evolution, properties, and climate impact of a large number of contrails in low-resolution models with a significantly simplified microphysical treatment (Burkhardt and Kärcher, 2011;Bock and Burkhardt, 2016a, 2016bBier et al, 2017;Chen and Gettelman, 2013;Schumann et al, 2015). While LES is ideally suited to resolving the flow field around the airplane and therefore the contrail evolution in the first few minutes, numerical weather prediction and climate models are suited to simulating the contrail evolution, which depends on the evolving atmospheric conditions influenced by synoptic-scale variability.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Contrail formation within cirrus: ICON-LEM simulations of the impact of cirrus cloud properties on contrail formation

Verma

Burkhardt

2022

Atmos. Chem. Phys.

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Abstract. Contrail formation within natural cirrus introduces large perturbations in cirrus ice crystal number concentrations, leading to modifications in cirrus microphysical and optical properties. The number of contrail ice crystals formed in an aircraft plume depends on the atmospheric state as well as aircraft and fuel properties. Our aim is to study contrail formation within cirrus and, in particular, the impact of pre-existing cirrus on the contrail formation processes. We implement a parameterization for contrail ice nucleation and the survival of contrail ice crystals within the vortex phase within the high-resolution ICON-LEM at a horizontal resolution of 625 m over Germany and modify the parameterizations in order to consider the impact of the pre-existing cirrus. We then simulate contrail formation and analyze the change in ice nucleation and survival due to the presence of cirrus ice crystals. We have selected two different synoptic situations to sample a large range of cirrus cloud properties from those representative of average thick in situ formed cirrus and liquid origin cirrus that are connected to a frontal system down to very thin cirrus within a high-pressure system. We find that contrail formation within cirrus mostly leads to increases in cirrus ice crystal numbers by a few orders of magnitude. Pre-existing cirrus has a discernible impact on the contrail formation threshold temperature and on contrail ice crystal number concentrations only if the cirrus ice water content is high and ice supersaturation is low. The cirrus ice crystals sucked into and subsequently sublimated within the aircraft's engine and the ice crystals mixed into the aircraft plume experiencing sublimation and later deposition lead to an increase in the contrail formation threshold temperature most of the time. Often this increase is negligible, but in the above atmospheric conditions the increase in the contrail formation threshold can be large, reaching maximum values of 2 K. Consequently, significant increases in ice nucleation are very seldom, but in areas of high cirrus ice water content and ice crystal number concentrations, contrail ice nucleation rates can be significantly increased, in particular at lower flight levels. Cirrus ice crystals can also lead to a reduction in ice nucleation, but negative changes are significantly smaller and less common. After nucleation cirrus and contrail ice crystals compete for water vapor, while the combined contrail and cirrus ice water mass grows. Once the aircraft plume gets trapped within the wake vortices and descends the plume relative humidity decreases so that eventually both cirrus and contrail ice crystals sublimate. We find that the impact of cirrus ice crystals on the contrail ice crystal loss within the descending vortices is negligible. Only for nucleation rates several orders of magnitude lower than the soot number emission index can the impact be noticeable, but the relevance of this impact is limited.

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Contrails and Their Impact on Shortwave Radiation and Photovoltaic Power Production – A Regional Model Study

Cited by 2 publications

References 38 publications

A Process Study on Thinning of Arctic Winter Cirrus Clouds With High‐Resolution ICON‐ART Simulations

A Process Study on Thinning of Arctic Winter Cirrus Clouds With High‐Resolution ICON‐ART Simulations

Contrail formation within cirrus: ICON-LEM simulations of the impact of cirrus cloud properties on contrail formation

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