Observations from the Arctic Summer Cloud Ocean Study (ASCOS), in the central Arctic sea-ice pack in late summer 2008, provide a detailed view of cloud–atmosphere–surface interactions and vertical ...mixing processes over the sea-ice environment. Measurements from a suite of ground-based remote sensors, near-surface meteorological and aerosol instruments, and profiles from radiosondes and a helicopter are combined to characterize a week-long period dominated by low-level, mixed-phase, stratocumulus clouds. Detailed case studies and statistical analyses are used to develop a conceptual model for the cloud and atmosphere structure and their interactions in this environment. Clouds were persistent during the period of study, having qualities that suggest they were sustained through a combination of advective influences and in-cloud processes, with little contribution from the surface. Radiative cooling near cloud top produced buoyancy-driven, turbulent eddies that contributed to cloud formation and created a cloud-driven mixed layer. The depth of this mixed layer was related to the amount of turbulence and condensed cloud water. Coupling of this cloud-driven mixed layer to the surface boundary layer was primarily determined by proximity. For 75% of the period of study, the primary stratocumulus cloud-driven mixed layer was decoupled from the surface and typically at a warmer potential temperature. Since the near-surface temperature was constrained by the ocean–ice mixture, warm temperatures aloft suggest that these air masses had not significantly interacted with the sea-ice surface. Instead, back-trajectory analyses suggest that these warm air masses advected into the central Arctic Basin from lower latitudes. Moisture and aerosol particles likely accompanied these air masses, providing necessary support for cloud formation. On the occasions when cloud–surface coupling did occur, back trajectories indicated that these air masses advected at low levels, while mixing processes kept the mixed layer in equilibrium with the near-surface environment. Rather than contributing buoyancy forcing for the mixed-layer dynamics, the surface instead simply appeared to respond to the mixed-layer processes aloft. Clouds in these cases often contained slightly higher condensed water amounts, potentially due to additional moisture sources from below.
The Arctic climate system includes numerous highly interactive small-scale physical processes in the atmosphere, sea ice, and ocean. During and since the International Polar Year 2007–2009, ...significant advances have been made in understanding these processes. Here, these recent advances are reviewed, synthesized, and discussed. In atmospheric physics, the primary advances have been in cloud physics, radiative transfer, mesoscale cyclones, coastal, and fjordic processes as well as in boundary layer processes and surface fluxes. In sea ice and its snow cover, advances have been made in understanding of the surface albedo and its relationships with snow properties, the internal structure of sea ice, the heat and salt transfer in ice, the formation of superimposed ice and snow ice, and the small-scale dynamics of sea ice. For the ocean, significant advances have been related to exchange processes at the ice–ocean interface, diapycnal mixing, double-diffusive convection, tidal currents and diurnal resonance. Despite this recent progress, some of these small-scale physical processes are still not sufficiently understood: these include wave–turbulence interactions in the atmosphere and ocean, the exchange of heat and salt at the ice–ocean interface, and the mechanical weakening of sea ice. Many other processes are reasonably well understood as stand-alone processes but the challenge is to understand their interactions with and impacts and feedbacks on other processes. Uncertainty in the parameterization of small-scale processes continues to be among the greatest challenges facing climate modelling, particularly in high latitudes. Further improvements in parameterization require new year-round field campaigns on the Arctic sea ice, closely combined with satellite remote sensing studies and numerical model experiments.
An Arctic CCN-limited cloud-aerosol regime Mauritsen, T.; Sedlar, J.; Tjernström, M. ...
Atmospheric chemistry and physics,
01/2011, Volume:
11, Issue:
1
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Open access
On average, airborne aerosol particles cool the Earth's surface directly by absorbing and scattering sunlight and indirectly by influencing cloud reflectivity, life time, thickness or extent. Here we ...show that over the central Arctic Ocean, where there is frequently a lack of aerosol particles upon which clouds may form, a small increase in aerosol loading may enhance cloudiness thereby likely causing a climatologically significant warming at the ice-covered Arctic surface. Under these low concentration conditions cloud droplets grow to drizzle sizes and fall, even in the absence of collisions and coalescence, thereby diminishing cloud water. Evidence from a case study suggests that interactions between aerosol, clouds and precipitation could be responsible for attaining the observed low aerosol concentrations.
The vertical structure of Arctic low-level clouds and Arctic boundary layer is studied, using observations from ASCOS (Arctic Summer Cloud Ocean Study), in the central Arctic, in late summer 2008. ...Two general types of cloud structures are examined: the "neutrally stratified" and "stably stratified" clouds. Neutrally stratified are mixed-phase clouds where radiative-cooling near cloud top produces turbulence that generates a cloud-driven mixed layer. When this layer mixes with the surface-generated turbulence, the cloud layer is coupled to the surface, whereas when such an interaction does not occur, it remains decoupled; the latter state is most frequently observed. The decoupled clouds are usually higher compared to the coupled; differences in thickness or cloud water properties between the two cases are however not found. The surface fluxes are also very similar for both states. The decoupled clouds exhibit a bimodal thermodynamic structure, depending on the depth of the sub-cloud mixed layer (SCML): clouds with shallower SCMLs are disconnected from the surface by weak inversions, whereas those that lay over a deeper SCML are associated with stronger inversions at the decoupling height. Neutrally stratified clouds generally precipitate; the evaporation/sublimation of precipitation often enhances the decoupling state. Finally, stably stratified clouds are usually lower, geometrically and optically thinner, non-precipitating liquid-water clouds, not containing enough liquid to drive efficient mixing through cloud-top cooling.
The Arctic has experienced large climate changes over recent decades, the largest for any region on Earth. To understand the underlying reasons for this climate sensitivity, reanalysis is an ...invaluable tool. The Arctic System Reanalysis (ASR) is a regional reanalysis, forced by ERA-Interim at the lateral boundaries and incorporating model physics adapted to Arctic conditions, developed to serve as a state-of-the-art, high-resolution synthesis tool for assessing Arctic climate variability and monitoring Arctic climate change. We use data from Arctic Summer Cloud-Ocean Study (ASCOS) to evaluate the performance of ASR and ERA-Interim for the Arctic Ocean. The ASCOS field experiment was deployed on the Swedish icebreaker Oden north of 87° N in the Atlantic sector of the Arctic during August and early September 2008. Data were collected during the transits from and to Longyearbyen and the 3-week ice drift with Oden moored to a drifting multiyear ice floe. These data are independent and detailed enough to evaluate process descriptions. The reanalyses captures basic meteorological variations coupled to the synoptic-scale systems, but have difficulties in estimating clouds and atmospheric moisture. While ERA-Interim has a systematic warm bias in the lowest troposphere, ASR has a cold bias of about the same magnitude on average. The results also indicate that more sophisticated descriptions of cloud microphysics in ASR did not significantly improve the modeling of cloud properties compared to ERA-Interim. This has consequences for the radiation balance, and hence the surface temperature, and illustrate how a modeling problem in one aspect of the atmosphere, here the clouds, feeds back to other parameters, especially near the surface and in the boundary layer.
Unique measurements of vertical size-resolved aerosol particle concentrations, trace gas concentrations and meteorological data were obtained during the Arctic Summer Cloud Ocean Study (ASCOS, ...www.ascos.se), an International Polar Year project aimed at establishing the processes responsible for formation and evolution of low-level clouds over the high Arctic summer pack ice. The experiment was conducted from on board the Swedish icebreaker Oden, and provided both ship- and helicopter-based measurements. This study focuses on the vertical helicopter profiles and onboard measurements obtained during a three-week period when Oden was anchored to a drifting ice floe, and sheds light on the characteristics of Arctic aerosol particles and their distribution throughout the lower atmosphere. Distinct differences in aerosol particle characteristics within defined atmospheric layers are identified. Within the lowermost couple hundred metres, transport from the marginal ice zone (MIZ), condensational growth and cloud processing develop the aerosol population. During two of the four representative periods defined in this study, such influence is shown. At altitudes above about 1 km, long-range transport occurs frequently. However, only infrequently does large-scale subsidence descend such air masses to become entrained into the mixed layer in the high Arctic, and therefore long-range transport plumes are unlikely to directly influence low-level stratiform cloud formation. Nonetheless, such plumes can influence the radiative balance of the planetary boundary layer (PBL) by influencing formation and evolution of higher clouds, as well as through precipitation transport of particles downwards. New particle formation was occasionally observed, particularly in the near-surface layer. We hypothesize that the origin of these ultrafine particles could be in biological processes, both primary and secondary, within the open leads between the pack ice and/or along the MIZ. In general, local sources, in combination with upstream boundary-layer transport of precursor gases from the MIZ, are considered to constitute the origin of cloud condensation nuclei (CCN) particles and thus be of importance for the formation of interior Arctic low-level clouds during summer, and subsequently, through cloud influences, for the melting and freezing of sea ice.
Measurements of submicron aerosol chemical composition were made over the central Arctic Ocean from 5 August to 8 September 2008 as a part of the Arctic Summer Cloud Ocean Study (ASCOS) using an ...aerosol mass spectrometer (AMS). The median levels of sulphate and organics for the entire study were 0.051 and 0.055 μ g m−3, respectively. Positive matrix factorisation was performed on the entire mass spectral time series and this enabled marine biogenic and continental sources of particles to be separated. These factors accounted for 33% and 36% of the sampled ambient aerosol mass, respectively, and they were both predominantly composed of sulphate, with 47% of the sulphate apportioned to marine biogenic sources and 48% to continental sources, by mass. Within the marine biogenic factor, the ratio of methane sulphonate to sulphate was 0.25 ± 0.02, consistent with values reported in the literature. The organic component of the continental factor was more oxidised than that of the marine biogenic factor, suggesting that it had a longer photochemical lifetime than the organics in the marine biogenic factor. The remaining ambient aerosol mass was apportioned to an organic-rich factor that could have arisen from a combination of marine and continental sources. In particular, given that the factor does not correlate with common tracers of continental influence, we cannot rule out that the organic factor arises from a primary marine source.
We present direct eddy covariance measurements of aerosol number fluxes, dominated by sub-50 nm particles, at the edge of an ice floe drifting in the central Arctic Ocean. The measurements were made ...during the ice-breaker borne ASCOS (Arctic Summer Cloud Ocean Study) expedition in August 2008 between 2°–10° W longitude and 87°–87.5° N latitude. The median aerosol transfer velocities over different surface types (open water leads, ice ridges, snow and ice surfaces) ranged from 0.27 to 0.68 mm s−1 during deposition-dominated episodes. Emission periods were observed more frequently over the open lead, while the snow behaved primarily as a deposition surface. Directly measured aerosol fluxes were compared with particle deposition parameterizations in order to estimate the emission flux from the observed net aerosol flux. Finally, the contribution of the open lead particle source to atmospheric variations in particle number concentration was evaluated and compared with the observed temporal evolution of particle number. The direct emission of aerosol particles from the open lead can explain only 5–10% of the observed particle number variation in the mixing layer close to the surface.
Three months of Doppler lidar wind measurements were obtained during the Arctic Cloud Summer Experiment on the icebreaker Oden during the summer of 2014. Such ship-borne Doppler measurements require ...active stabilisation to remove the effects of ship motion. We demonstrate that the combination of a commercial Doppler lidar with a custom-made motion-stabilisation platform enables the retrieval of wind profiles in the Arctic atmospheric boundary layer during both cruising and ice-breaking with statistical uncertainties comparable to land-based measurements. This held true particularly within the atmospheric boundary layer even though the overall aerosol load was very low. Motion stabilisation was successful for high wind speeds in open water and the resulting wave conditions. It allows for the retrieval of vertical winds with a random error below 0.2 m s−1. The comparison of lidar-measured wind and radio soundings gives a mean bias of 0.3 m s−1 (2°) and a mean standard deviation of 1.1 m s−1 (12°) for wind speed (wind direction). The agreement for wind direction degrades with height. The combination of a motion-stabilised platform with a low-maintenance autonomous Doppler lidar has the potential to enable continuous long-term high-resolution ship-based wind profile measurements over the oceans.
The representation of the atmospheric boundary layer is an important part of weather and climate models and impacts many applications such as air quality and wind energy. Over the years, the ...performance in modeling 2-m temperature and 10-m wind speed has improved but errors are still significant. This is in particular the case under clear skies and low wind speed conditions at night as well as during winter in stably stratified conditions over land and ice. In this paper, the authors review these issues and provide an overview of the current understanding and model performance. Results from weather forecast and climate models are used to illustrate the state of the art as well as findings and recommendations from three intercomparison studies held within the Global Energy and Water Exchanges (GEWEX) Atmospheric Boundary Layer Study (GABLS). Within GABLS, the focus has been on the examination of the representation of the stable boundary layer and the diurnal cycle over land in clear-sky conditions. For this purpose, single-column versions of weather and climate models have been compared with observations, research models, and large-eddy simulations. The intercomparison cases are based on observations taken in the Arctic, Kansas, and Cabauw in the Netherlands. From these studies, we find that even for the noncloudy boundary layer important parameterization challenges remain.
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