ACP Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics ACP 1680-7324 Copernicus GmbH Göttingen, Germany 10.5194/acp-9-2319-2009 Modelling of cirrus clouds – Part 2: Competition of different nucleation mechanisms Spichtinger P. 1 Gierens K. M. 2 Institute for Atmospheric and Climate Science, ETH Zurich, 8092 Zurich, Switzerland Deutsches Zentrum für Luft- und Raumfahrt, Institut für Physik der Atmosphäre, Oberpfaffenhofen, Germany 01 04 2009 9 7 2319 2334 This is an open-access article ditributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. This article is available from http://www.atmos-chem-phys.net/9/2319/2009/acp-9-2319-2009.html The full text article is available as a PDF file from http://www.atmos-chem-phys.net/9/2319/2009/acp-9-2319-2009.pdf

We study the competition of two different freezing mechanisms (homogeneous and heterogeneous freezing) in the same environment for cold cirrus clouds. To this goal we use the recently developed and validated ice microphysics scheme (Spichtinger and Gierens, 2009a) which distinguishes between ice classes according to their formation process. We investigate cases with purely homogeneous ice formation and compare them with cases where background ice nuclei in varying concentration heterogeneously form ice prior to homogeneous nucleation. We perform additionally a couple of sensitivity studies regarding threshold humidity for heterogeneous freezing, uplift speed, and ambient temperature, and we study the influence of random motions induced by temperature fluctuations in the clouds. We find three types of cloud evolution, homogeneously dominated, heterogeneously dominated, and a mixed type where neither nucleation process dominates. The latter case is prone to long–lasting in–cloud ice supersaturation of the order 30% and more.

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