Microphysical modeling of cirrus 2. Sensitivity studies

Abstract

These studies suggest that the leading sources of uncertainty in the model are the phase change (liquid-solid) energy barrier and the ice-water surface energy which dominate the homogeneous freezing nucleation rate and the coagulation sticking efficiency at low temperatures which controls the production of large ice crystals (radii greater than 100 μm). We found that (unlike stratus clouds) variations in the total number of condensation nuclei (CN) have little effect on cirrus microphysical and radiative properties, since nucleation occurs only on the largest CN at the tail of the size distribution. -from Authors