The structure of turbulence and mixed-phase cloud microphysics  in a highly supercooled altocumulus cloud

Barrett, Paul A.; Blyth, Alan; Brown, Philip R. A.; Abel, Steven J.

doi:https://doi.org/10.5194/acp-20-1921-2020

Articles | Volume 20, issue 4

https://doi.org/10.5194/acp-20-1921-2020

© Author(s) 2020. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

https://doi.org/10.5194/acp-20-1921-2020

© Author(s) 2020. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

Articles | Volume 20, issue 4

Research article

|

20 Feb 2020

Research article |

| 20 Feb 2020

The structure of turbulence and mixed-phase cloud microphysics in a highly supercooled altocumulus cloud

Paul A. Barrett, Alan Blyth, Philip R. A. Brown, and Steven J. Abel

Data sets

Post processing library for the data from the FAAM aircraft Facility for Airborne Atmospheric Measurements https://github.com/ncasuk/decades-pp

FAAM B674 PIKNMIX flight: Airborne atmospheric measurements from core and non-core instrument suites on board the BAE-146 aircraft Facility for Airborne Atmospheric Measurements, Natural Environment Research Council, and Met Office https://catalogue.ceda.ac.uk/uuid/829a7d5425424584aa8455ca512ad0da

Short summary

Here we present new in situ observations from altocumulus clouds made with a research aircraft. By carefully measuring the cloud top height, we are able to study the turbulence and cloud properties in high vertical resolution, something not presented before. The clouds contain both ice particles and liquid drops, even though the temperature is −30 °C. These measurements will hopefully assist future developers of climate models to verify and assess the performance of simulations.