A118-0011
Toward understanding precipitation effects on cellular organization transitions using ground-based rain evaporation rate retrievals constrained by aircraft measurements
Friday, 11 December 2020
Poster
Mikael Witte1, Zeen Zhu2, Katia Lamer3, Ian Glenn4, Matthew D Lebsock5 and Joao Teixeira5, (1)University of California Los Angeles, JIFRESSE, Los Angeles, CA, United States, (2)Stony Brook University, School of Marine and Atmospheric Sciences, Stony Brook, NY, United States, (3)Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA, United States, (4)NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, United States, (5)Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, CA, United States
Abstract:
Marine shallow clouds are frequently observed to organize in closed and open cells, yet the factors responsible for such cellular organization remain poorly understood. Since precipitation is also a common phenomenon in marine shallow clouds, it has been hypothesized that precipitation evaporation may play a role in determining cloud organization. Although it is desirable to capitalize on the long data records of ground-based remote sensors to retrieve evaporation rate in falling precipitation, doing so requires a number of simplifications and assumptions regarding statistical stationarity, drop size distribution shape and environmental thermodynamic state.
The current study uses aircraft in situ measurements collected during the Aerosol and Cloud Experiments in the Eastern North Atlantic (ACE-ENA) field campaign to statistically evaluate and quantify uncertainty associated with a radar-lidar-based evaporative flux retrieval; to be exact, we compare temperature, water vapor and drop size distribution measurements collected from an ensemble of aircraft spiral sounding legs upwind of the ENA ground site during warm precipitation events and compare them to ground retrievals performed on Raman lidar, ceilometer lidar and Ka-band zenith-pointing radar (KAZR) data collected at the approximate time that the aircraft overpassed the site.
It is our intention to capitalize on the ability of ground-based remote sensors to document clouds, drizzle and evaporation rate to understand the role of evaporating precipitation in catalyzing changes in cloud cellular organization.
