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NASA NTRS2010

Separating Real and Apparent Effects of Cloud, Humidity, and Dynamics on Aerosol Optical Thickness near Cloud Edges

Aerosol optical thickness (AOT) is one of aerosol parameters that can be measured on a routine basis with reasonable accuracy from Sun-photometric observations at the surface. However, AOT-derived near clouds is fraught with various real effects and artifacts, posing a big challenge for studying aerosol and cloud interactions. Recently, several studies have reported correlations between AOT and cloud cover, pointing to potential cloud contamination and the aerosol humidification effect; however, not many quantitative assessments have been made. In this study, various potential causes of apparent correlations are investigated in order to separate the real effects from the artifacts, using well-maintained observations from the Aerosol Robotic Network, Total Sky Imager, airborne nephelometer, etc., over the Southern Great Plains site operated by the U.S. Department of Energy's Atmospheric Radiation Measurement Program. It was found that aerosol humidification effects can explain about one fourth of the correlation between the cloud cover and AOT. New particle genesis, cloud-processed particles, atmospheric dynamics, and aerosol indirect effects are likely to be contributing to as much as the remaining three fourth of the relationship between cloud cover and AOT.

Jeong, Myeong-Jae↗

NASA NTRS1984

Thunderstorm cloud top dynamics as inferred from satellite observations and models

Satellite observations of convective towers penetrating the tropopause are summarized. Three classes of thunderstorm cloud tops including storm tops that have a monotonic temperature-height pattern with the highest point being the coldest point (class 1), tops that have a colocated cold and high point with the warm point on the downward slope to the rear of the highest point (class 2), and tops in which the cold point is offset upwind from the high point, with a cold-warm couplet straddling the convective cloud top (class 3), are described. A one-dimensional cloud parcel model applied in the overshooting region is used to explore the causes of the storm top's unique temperature/height structures.

Adler, R. F.↗

NASA NTRS1990

Overshooting thunderstorm cloud top dynamics as approximated by a linear Lagrangian parcel model with analytic exact solutions

Results are presented from a linear Lagrangian entraining parcel model of an overshooting thunderstorm cloud top. The model, which is similar to that of Adler and Mack (1986), gives analytic exact solutions for vertical velocity and temperature by representing mixing with Rayleigh damping instead of nonlinearly. Model results are presented for various combinations of stratospheric lapse rate, drag intensity, and mixing strength. The results are compared to those of Adler and Mack.

Schlesinger, Robert E.↗

NASA NTRS1998

Monte Carlo Calculations of Polarized Microwave Radiation Emerging from Cloud Structures

The last decade has seen tremendous growth in cloud dynamical and microphysical models that are able to simulate storms and storm systems with very high spatial resolution, typically of the order of a few kilometers. The fairly realistic distributions of cloud and hydrometeor properties that these models generate has in turn led to a renewed interest in the three-dimensional microwave radiative transfer modeling needed to understand the effect of cloud and rainfall inhomogeneities upon microwave observations. Monte Carlo methods, and particularly backwards Monte Carlo methods have shown themselves to be very desirable due to the quick convergence of the solutions. Unfortunately, backwards Monte Carlo methods are not well suited to treat polarized radiation. This study reviews the existing Monte Carlo methods and presents a new polarized Monte Carlo radiative transfer code. The code is based on a forward scheme but uses aliasing techniques to keep the computational requirements equivalent to the backwards solution. Radiative transfer computations have been performed using a microphysical-dynamical cloud model and the results are presented together with the algorithm description.

Kummerow, Christian↗

NASA NTRSDate not supplied

Parameterization of Vertical Cloud Distribution from C3M and MERRA Data Using ML Method

Clouds play a key role in regulating the hydrological cycle and the Earth's radiative energy budget. However, global climate models (GCMs) with a horizontal grid spacing on the order of 100 km have limitations in representing sub-grid cloud dynamics with spatial scales on the order of 1 km, leading to potential uncertainties in cloud radiative feedback on the global scale. In our research, we will leverage the capabilities of Deep Machine Learning (DML) methods to construct parameterizations of sub-grid volumetric cloud fraction (VCF), which is the frequency of occurrence on a grid volume accumulated in the horizontal and vertical directions. Our investigation delves into the intricate relationship between VCF obtained from the NASA CALIPSO-CloudSat-CERES-MODIS (CCCM) satellite observation data and 3-D MERRA-2 reanalysis meteorological profiling data (e.g., wind, relative humidity, temperature). Through a comprehensive one-year data training utilizing the Sequence to Sequence DML method, we have successfully disentangled the complicated cloud formation dynamics across diverse meteorological conditions through a day-to-day analysis framework. Preliminary findings reveal promising statistical agreements in geographical and vertical distributions and seasonal variations of volumetric cloud fraction between ML prediction and satellite measurements. These results underscore the aptitude of our DML model to discern underlying cloud physical processes and accurately represent sub-grid cloud formation dynamics. Additionally, we have also employed trained neural network to analyze uncertainties arising from errors in meteorological data, further enhancing the robustness of our VCF parameterization.

Shan Zeng↗

NASA NTRS2015

Evidence for a Dynamic Nanodust Cloud Enveloping the Moon

The exospheres that surround airless bodies such as the Moon are tenuous, atmosphere-like layers whose constituent particles rarely collide with one another. Some particles contained within such exospheres are the product of direct interactions between airless bodies and the space environment, and offer insights into space weathering processes. NASAs Lunar Atmosphere and Dust Environment Explorer (LADEE) mission studied the Moons exospheric constituents in situ and detected a permanent dust exosphere1 of particles with radii as small as 300 nm. Here we present evidence from LADEE spectral data for an additional fluctuating nanodust exosphere at the Moon containing a population of particles sufficiently dense to be detectable via scattered sunlight. We compare two anti-Sun spectral observations: one near the peak of the Quadrantidmeteoroid stream, the other during a period of comparativelyweak stream activity. The former shows a negative spectralslope consistent with backscattering of sunlight by nanodustgrains with radii less than 20 to 30 nm; the latter has a flatterspectral slope. We hypothesize that a spatially and temporallyvariable nanodust exosphere may exist at the Moon, and thatit is modulated by changes in meteoroid impact rates, suchas during encounters with meteoroid streams. The findingssuggest that similar nanodust exospheresand the particle ejection and transport processes that form themmay occurat other airless bodies.

Moon↗

NASA NTRS1987

Formation of giant molecular clouds in global spiral structures: The role of orbital dynamics and cloud-cloud collisions

The different roles played by orbital dynamics and dissipative cloud-cloud collisions in the formation of giant molecular clouds (GMCs) in a global spiral structure are investigated. The interstellar medium (ISM) is simulated by a system of particles, representing clouds, which orbit in a spiral-perturbed, galactic gravitational field. The overall magnitude and width of the global cloud density distribution in spiral arms is very similar in the collisional and collisionless simulations. The results suggest that the assumed number density and size distribution of clouds and the details of individual cloud-cloud collisions have relatively little effect on these features. Dissipative cloud-cloud collisions play an important steadying role for the cloud system's global spiral structure. Dissipative cloud-cloud collisions also damp the relative velocity dispersion of clouds in massive associations and thereby aid in the effective assembling of GMC-like complexes.

Roberts, W. W., Jr.↗

NASA NTRS1973

Research in plasma physics

Three aspects of barium ion cloud dynamics are discussed. First, the effect of the ratio of ion cloud conductivity to background ionospheric conductivity on the motion of barium ion clouds is investigated and compared with observations of barium ion clouds. This study led to the suggestion that the conjugate ionosphere participates in the dynamics of barium ion clouds. Second, analytic work on the deformation of ion clouds is presented. Third, a linearized stability theory was extended to include the effect of the finite extent of an ion cloud, as well as the effect of the ratio of ion cloud to ionospheric conductivities. The stability properties of a plasma with contra-streaming ion beams parallel to a magnetic field are investigated. The results are interpreted in terms of parameters appropriate for collisionless shock waves. It is found that this particular instability can be operative only if the up-stream Alfven Mach number exceeds 5.5.

Source record↗

NASA NTRS1983

Dynamical evolution of the Oort cometary cloud

The dynamical evolution of comets in the Oort cloud under the influence of stellar perturbations has been modeled using Monte Carlo techniques. It is shown that the cloud has been depleted over the history of the solar system. Comets are lost from the cloud by direct ejection due to close stellar encounters, diffusion of aphelia to distances beyond the sun's sphere of influence, or diffusion of perihelia into the planetary region where Jupiter and Saturn perturbations either eject them on hyperbolic trajectories or capture them to short-period orbits. The population of the cloud is estimated to be 1.0 - 1.5 x 10 to the 12th comets and the total mass is on the order of 1.9 earth masses. In addition to random passing stars, less frequent encounters with giant molecular clouds may play a significant role in randomizing the orbits of comets in the cloud and reducing the effective radius of the sun's sphere of influence.

Weissman, P. R.↗

NASA NTRS2015

How Difficult is it to Reduce Low-Level Cloud Biases With the Higher-Order Turbulence Closure Approach in Climate Models?

Low-level clouds cover nearly half of the Earth and play a critical role in regulating the energy and hydrological cycle. Despite the fact that a great effort has been put to advance the modeling and observational capability in recent years, low-level clouds remains one of the largest uncertainties in the projection of future climate change. Low-level cloud feedbacks dominate the uncertainty in the total cloud feedback in climate sensitivity and projection studies. These clouds are notoriously difficult to simulate in climate models due to its complicated interactions with aerosols, cloud microphysics, boundary-layer turbulence and cloud dynamics. The biases in both low cloud coverage/water content and cloud radiative effects (CREs) remain large. A simultaneous reduction in both cloud and CRE biases remains elusive. This presentation first reviews the effort of implementing the higher-order turbulence closure (HOC) approach to representing subgrid-scale turbulence and low-level cloud processes in climate models. There are two HOCs that have been implemented in climate models. They differ in how many three-order moments are used. The CLUBB are implemented in both CAM5 and GDFL models, which are compared with IPHOC that is implemented in CAM5 by our group. IPHOC uses three third-order moments while CLUBB only uses one third-order moment while both use a joint double-Gaussian distribution to represent the subgrid-scale variability. Despite that HOC is more physically consistent and produces more realistic low-cloud geographic distributions and transitions between cumulus and stratocumulus regimes, GCMs with traditional cloud parameterizations outperform in CREs because tuning of this type of models is more extensively performed than those with HOCs. We perform several tuning experiments with CAM5 implemented with IPHOC in an attempt to produce the nearly balanced global radiative budgets without deteriorating the low-cloud simulation. One of the issues in CAM5-IPHOC is that cloud water content is much higher than in CAM5, which is combined with higher low-cloud coverage to produce larger shortwave CREs in some low-cloud prevailing regions. Thus, the cloud-radiative feedbacks are exaggerated there. The turning exercise is focused on microphysical parameters, which are also commonly used for tuning in climate models. The results will be discussed in this presentation.

Xu, Kuan-Man↗

NASA NTRS2015

Improving High-Resolution Weather Forecasts using the Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) Model with an Updated Kain-Fritsch Scheme

Efforts to improve the prediction accuracy of high resolution (1-10 km) surface precipitation distribution and variability are of vital importance to local aspects of air pollution, wet deposition, and regional climate. However, precipitation biases and errors can occur at these spatial scales due to uncertainties in initial meteorological conditions and/or grid-scale cloud microphysics schemes. In particular, it is still unclear to what extent a subgrid-scale convection scheme could be modified to bring in scale-awareness for improving high-resolution short-term precipitation forecasts in the WRF model. To address these issues, we introduced scale-aware parameterized cloud dynamics for high-resolution forecasts by making several changes to the Kain-Fritsch (KF) convective parameterization scheme in the WRF model. These changes include subgrid-scale cloud-radiation interactions, a dynamic adjustment timescale, impacts of cloud updraft mass fluxes on grid-scale vertical velocity, and lifting condensation level-based entrainment methodology that includes scale dependency. A series of 48-hour retrospective forecasts using a combination of three treatments of convection (KF, updated KF, and the use of no cumulus parameterization), two cloud microphysics schemes and two types of initial condition datasets were performed over the U.S. southern Great Plains on 9- and 3-km grid spacings during the summers of 2002 and 2010. Results indicate that (1) the source of initial conditions play a key role in high-resolution precipitation forecasting, and (2) our updated KF scheme greatly alleviates the excessive precipitation at 9-km grid spacing and improves results at 3-km grid spacing as well. Overall, we found that the updated KF scheme incorporated into a high-resolution model does provide better forecasts for precipitation location and intensity.

convective parameterization↗

NASA NTRS1989

A two micron polarization survey toward dark clouds

A near infrared (2.2 micron) polarization survey of about 190 sources was conducted toward nearby dark clouds. The sample includes both background field stars and embedded young stellar objects. The aim is to determine the magnetic field structure in the densest regions of the dark clouds and study the role of magnetic fields in various phases of star formation processes, and to study the grain alignment efficiency in the dark cloud cores. From the polarization of background field stars and intrinsically unpolarized embedded sources, the magnetic field structure was determined in these clouds. From the intrinsic polarization of young stellar objects, the spatial distribution was determined of circumstellar dust around young stars. Combining the perpendicularity between the disks and magnetic fields with perpendicularity between the cloud elongation and magnetic fields, it is concluded that the magnetic fields might have dominated nearly all aspects of cloud dynamics, from the initial collapse of the clouds right through to the formation of disks/tori around young stars in these low to intermediate mass star forming clouds of the Taurus, Ophiuchus, and Perseus.

Tamura, M.↗

NASA NTRS1975

The clouds of Venus

The physical and chemical properties of the clouds of Venus are reviewed with special emphasis on data that are related to cloud dynamics. None of the currently popular interpretations of cloud phenomena on Venus is consistent with all the data. Either a considerable fraction of the observational evidence is faulty or has been misinterpreted, or the clouds of Venus are much more complex than the current simplistic models. Several lines of attack are suggested to resolve some of the contradictions.

Young, A. T.↗

NASA NTRS2009

Climate Change and Tropical Total Lightning

While global warming is regarded as a fact by many in the scientific community, its future impact remains a challenge to be determined and measured. The International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) assessment report (IPCC, 2007) shows inconclusive answers on global rainfall trends and general agreement on a future drier climate with increased global warming. The relationship between temperature, humidity and convection is not linear and is strongly dependent on regional scale features, such as topography and land cover. Furthermore, the relationship between convective lightning production (thunderstorms) and temperature is even more complicated, being subjected to the cloud dynamics and microphysics. Total lightning (intracloud and cloud-to-ground) monitoring is a relatively new field of observation. Global and tropical total lightning began to be more extensively measured by satellites in the mid 90s. In this scope, the Lightning Imaging Sensor (LIS) onboard of the Tropical Rainfall Measurement Mission (TRMM) has been operational for over 11 years. Here we address total lightning trends observed by LIS from 1998 to 2008 in different temporal (annual and seasonal) and spatial (large and regional) scales. The observed 11-year trends are then associate to different predicted/hypothesized climate change scenarios.

Albrecht, R.↗

NASA NTRS1975

The clouds of Venus

The physical and chemical properties of the clouds of Venus are reviewed, with special emphasis on data that are related to cloud dynamics. None of the currently-popular interpretations of cloud phenomena on Venus is consistent with all the data. Either a considerable fraction of the observational evidence is faulty or has been misinterpreted, or the clouds of Venus are much more complex than the current simplistic models. Several lines of attack are suggested to resolve some of the contradictions. A sound understanding of the clouds appears to be several years in the future.

Young, A. T.↗

NASA NTRS1987

FIRE - The First ISCCP Regional Experiment

The First International Satellite Cloud Climatology Project Regional Experiment (FIRE) designed to study the roles of clouds, in particular marine stratocumulus and cirrus-cloud systems, in the global climate is discussed. The objectives of FIRE are: (1) to develop a cloud-classification scheme; (2) to validate and improve satellite cloud-retrieval techniques; (3) to improve cloud radiation models; (4) to collect cloud space/time statistics; (5) to improve cloud dynamics models; and (6) to validate and improve GCM cloud parameterizations. The methods used to acquire extended time data and intensive field observations are described. The extended time and intensive field data collected during the FIRE are to be archived in the NASA Pilot Climate Data System at Goddard Space Flight Center.

Cox, Stephen K.↗

NASA NTRS1990

Structures observed on the spot radiance fields during the FIRE experiment

Three Spot images taken during the FIRE experiment on stratocumulus are analyzed. From this high resolution data detailed observations of the true cloud radiance field may be made. The structure and inhomogeneity of these radiance fields hold important implications for the radiation budget, while the fine scale structure in radiance field provides information on cloud dynamics. Wieliki and Welsh, and Parker et al., have quantified the inhomogeneities of the cumulus clouds through a careful examination of the distribution of cloud (and hole) size as functions of an effective cloud diameter and radiance threshold. Cahalan (1988) has compared for different cloud types of (stratocumulus, fair weather cumulus, convective clouds in the ITCZ) the distributions of clouds (and holes) sizes, the relation between the size and the perimeter of these clouds (and holes), and examining the possibility of scale invariance. These results are extended from LANDSAT resolution (57 m and 30 m) to the Spot resolution (10 m) resolution in the case of boundary layer clouds. Particular emphasis is placed on the statistics of zones of high and low reflectivity as a function of a threshold reflectivity.

Seze, Genevieve↗

NASA NTRS1999

TRMM Field Campaigns: Objectives and Status Report

The Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission (TRMM) satellite has been sending valuable data since launch in November 1997. Some of the key goals of the joint NASA (US) and NASDA (Japan) mission are: (1) to estimate the four-dimensional diabatic heating in the tropical and subtropical atmosphere, (2) understand the role of latent heating in driving tropical and extratropical circulations, (3) obtain monthly area-averaged estimates of rainfall over the data-sparse oceans, and (4) estimate the relative contribution of convective and stratiform precipitation over different regions during different seasons. The overarching scientific objective is to understand and improve estimates of rainfall and latent heating profiles throughout the global tropics. This requires observations for fundamental understanding of cloud dynamics and microphysics, as well as for validation, testing assumptions and error estimates of cloud-resolving models, forward radiative transfer models, algorithms used to estimate rainfall statistics and vertical structure of precipitation from surface-based radar, and from satellites. Field experiments designed to contribute to this understanding have been conducted in Texas and the South China Sea in spring of 1998, Florida in summer of 1998, and interior Brazil in (boreal) winter 1999. In summer 1999, a major oceanic campaign will be based at Kwajalein Atoll. Some early results will be highlighted, noting some significant contrasts between oceanic and continental convective systems.

Zipser, Edward I.↗