Frequency of occurrence of rain from liquid‐, mixed‐, and ice‐phase clouds derived from A‐Train satellite retrievals

Abstract

A climatology of thermodynamic phase of precipitating cloud is presented derived from global—land and ocean—, retrievals from Cloudsat, CALIPSO, and Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer. Like precipitation rate, precipitation frequency is dominated by warm rain, defined as rain produced via the liquid phase only, over the tropical oceans outside the Intertropical Convergence Zone and by cold rain, produced via the ice phase, over the midlatitude oceans and continents. Warm rain is very infrequent over the continents, with significant warm rain found only in onshore flow in the tropics, and over India, China, and Indochina. Comparison of the properties of precipitating and nonprecipitating warm clouds shows that the scarcity of warm rain over land can be explained by smaller effective radii in continental clouds that delay the onset of precipitation. The results highlight the importance of ice‐phase processes for the global hydrological cycle and may lead to an improved parameterization of precipitation in general circulation models.

The HD(CP)<sup>2</sup> Observational Prototype Experiment (HOPE) – an overview

“…The accurate representation of the ice phase in numerical models is a crucial task since cold rain is the main driver of precipitation formation at midlatitudes (Mülmenstädt et al, 2015). The continuous observations of the LACROS supersite during HOPE-Jülich enabled us to obtain statistical information about the primary ice production in stratiform midlevel mixed-phase cloud layers.…”

Estimating precipitation susceptibility in warm marine clouds using multi-sensor aerosol and cloud products from A-Train satellites

“…All of these satellites operate in the framework of the A-Train constellation (L'Ecuyer and Jiang, 2010;Stephens et al, 2002). Considering most of the warm rainfall occurs in the marine areas (Mülmenstädt et al, 2015) and that satellite retrievals often suffer large uncertainties in the polar regions (Seethala and Horváth, 2010) Table 2.…”

Anthropogenic Aerosol Influences on Mixed-Phase Clouds

“…These clouds and possible aerosol effects on them are discussed in the "Aerosol Effects on Deep Convective Clouds" section. The majority of precipitation in mid-latitudes originates in clouds containing ice [68] but melts to raindrops or drizzle drops on the way to the ground. While precipitation from pure ice clouds (e.g., high cirrus clouds) rarely reaches the ground, the precipitation-forming clouds are mainly MPCs (stratiform and convective) in which ice crystals quickly grow to precipitation-sized particles and leave the cloud.…”