Imperial College London
Portrait Picture

Professor Maarten van Reeuwijk

Faculty of Engineering, Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering

Professor of Urban Fluid Mechanics
 
 
 
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Contact

 

+44 (0)20 7594 6059m.vanreeuwijk Website CV

 
 
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Assistant

 

Miss Rebecca Naessens +44 (0)20 7594 5990

 
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Location

 

331Skempton BuildingSouth Kensington Campus

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Summary

 

Publications

Citation

BibTex format

@misc{Quilelli:2023:10.5194/egusphere-egu23-16095,
author = {Quilelli, Correa Rocha Ribeiro R and Gryspeerdt, E and Van, Reeuwijk M},
doi = {10.5194/egusphere-egu23-16095},
title = {Retrieving cloud sensitivity to aerosol using ship emissions},
type = {Other},
url = {http://dx.doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu23-16095},
year = {2023}
}
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RIS format (EndNote, RefMan)

TY  - GEN
AB  - <jats:p>Aerosol-cloud interactions are one of the key uncertainties in understanding future climate change. A commonly used method for constraining these interactions is using ship tracks. Aerosol-containing plumes from ships can develop into linearly shaped clouds identifiable in satellite images, isolating the aerosol impact on clouds. Previous studies have shown that ship tracks form more commonly in clean conditions, but even accounting for this, many ships that might be expected to form ship tracks do not. This leads to uncertainties in aerosol-cloud interactions and their climate impact. &#160;Ship track formation depends on the aerosol-containing plumes from the ship being sufficiently concentrated upon reaching the cloud. The cloud must also be sensitive to aerosol. In focus are updraft-limited clouds: smaller updrafts promote slower cooling as a cloud parcel rises, higher critical supersaturation values and lower aerosol activation fractions. It is not clear which of these are more important, but it is vital to understand them if we are using ship tracks to retrieve cloud sensitivity to aerosol.&#160;&#160; &#160;We develop a plume-parcel model to address these issues to estimate cloud droplet enhancements in ship tracks. Ship aerosol concentrations at the cloud height were modelled as plumes, simulating the shorter timescales of injection. Droplet number concentration enhancements were estimated using K&#246;hler theory for over one hundred thousand ships off the coast of California. &#160;Using a constant updraft, the model was able to achieve reasonable enhancements (r2 ranging between (0.32, 0.4)). These enhancements were shown to be significantly sensitive to the choice of the updraft. In order to examine the hypothetical updraft values required for activation, an optimisation algorithm was developed to fit updrafts to cloud enhancement observations; a 1-1 correlation was achieved between observed a
AU  - Quilelli,Correa Rocha Ribeiro R
AU  - Gryspeerdt,E
AU  - Van,Reeuwijk M
DO  - 10.5194/egusphere-egu23-16095
PY  - 2023///
TI  - Retrieving cloud sensitivity to aerosol using ship emissions
UR  - http://dx.doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu23-16095
ER  -
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