Calendar Event Details
AEROCENTER seminar by Dr. Lazaros Oreopoulos
Affiliation: NASA GSFC
Event Date: Tuesday, February 10, 2015
Location: g133
Time: 11:00 AM
Aerosol-cloud interactions through the prism of cloud regimes
Systematic changes of clouds and precipitation are notoriously difficult to ascribe to aerosols. The seminar will present yet one more attempt to at least detect the signal of aerosol-cloud-precipitation interactions. We use the concept of cloud regimes to conduct the investigation. Previous studies using cloud regimes focused on what we call here "dynamical" regimes, and while we continue to adopt those too for our analysis, we also introduce a new class of regimes, those of the "microphysical" variety. Our analysis relies on MODIS Level-3 data for clouds and aerosols, and TMPA data for precipitation. The regimes are derived by applying clustering analysis on MODIS joint histograms, and once each grid cell is assigned a regime, aerosol and precipitation data can be composited by regime. We seek evidence of aerosol effects both in regimes with large fractions of deep ice-rich clouds, as well as regimes where low liquid phase clouds dominate. Signals can be seen, especially when the analysis is broken by land/ocean and when additional filters are applied, but there are of course caveats which will be discussed.
Posted or updated: Thursday, January 29, 2015
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