Towards a more reliable forecast of ice supersaturation: Concept of a one-moment ice cloud scheme that avoids saturation adjustment

Abstract

Abstract. A significant share of aviation's climate impact is due to persistent contrails. Avoiding the creation of contrails that exert a warming impact is thus a crucial step in approaching the goal of sustainable air transportation. For this purpose, a reliable forecast of when and where persistent contrails are expected to form is needed, that is, a reliable prediction of ice supersaturation. With such a forecast at hand it would be possible to plan aircraft routes on which the formation of persistent contrails can be avoided. One problem on the way to these forecasts is the current systematic underestimation of the frequency and degree of ice supersaturation on cruise altitudes in numerical weather prediction due to the practice of "saturation adjustment". In this common parameterisation, the air inside cirrus clouds is assumed to be exactly at ice saturation, while measurement studies have found cirrus clouds to be quite often in an ice supersaturated state. In this study, we propose a new ice cloud scheme that overcomes saturation adjustment by explicitly modelling the decay of the in-cloud humidity after nucleation, thereby allowing for both in-cloud super- and subsaturation. To achieve this, we introduce the in-cloud humidity as a new prognostic variable and derive the humidity distribution in newly generated cloud parts from a stochastic box model that divides a model grid box into a large number of air parcels and treats them individually. The new scheme is then tested against a parameterisation that uses saturation adjustment, where the stochastic box model serves as a benchmark. It is shown that saturation adjustment underestimates humidity both shortly after nucleation, when the actual cloud is still highly supersaturated, and also in aged cirrus if temperature keeps decreasing, as the actual cloud remains in a slightly supersaturated state in this case. The new parameterisation on the other hand closely follows the behaviour of the stochastic box model in any considered case. We conclude that our parameterisation is promising but needs further testing in more realistic frameworks.

Variability of the properties of the distribution of the relative humidity with respect to ice: Implications for contrail formation

“…Accurate representation of the Ice SuperSaturation Regions (ISSR) in numerical weather prediction models is important to improve the prediction of contrail-prone conditions, which is important for mitigation strategies aiming to reduce the climate impact of the aviation sector through contrail avoidance (Sperber and Gierens, 2023). This first requires a good characterization of the spatial and temporal distribution of RHi.…”