Abstract
Most aerosol-cloud-climate assessment studies assume that aerosol with a substantial fraction of soluble material are the sole source of Cloud Condensation Nuclei (CCN). However, insoluble species can also act as good CCN, even if they lack appreciable amounts of soluble material. The source of hygroscopicity in these particles is the adsorption of water vapor onto the surface of the particle. Moreover, during atmospheric transport, fresh dust undergoes aging which results in a coating of soluble material on its surface that augments its CCN activity. Given that dust may affect precipitation in climate-sensitive areas, the ability to capture the complex impact of mineral dust on cloud droplet formation is an important issue for global and regional models. The “unified dust activation framework” of Kumar et al. (2011) can be used to calculate the CCN activity of both fresh and aged dust. In this study, simulations of droplet number are carried out with the GMI chemical transport model. GMI simulates global atmospheric composition which is used to drive the droplet number calculations of Kumar et al. (2011) parameterization. This new framework is a comprehensive treatment of the inherent hydrophilicity from adsorption and acquired hygroscopicity from soluble salts in dust particles and is used to assess the impact of dust and adsorption activation on the predicted global droplet number concentration.
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Acknowledgments
We would like to acknowledge support from NASA-ACMAP, CONOCO-Phillips, and NOAA.
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Karydis, V.A., Kumar, P., Barahona, D., Sokolik, I.N., Nenes, A. (2013). Assessing the Impact of Mineral Dust and Adsorption Activation on Cloud Droplet Formation. In: Helmis, C., Nastos, P. (eds) Advances in Meteorology, Climatology and Atmospheric Physics. Springer Atmospheric Sciences. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-29172-2_73
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-29172-2_73
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