Abstract
Sea-salt aerosols proposed for injection in marine cloud brightening geoengineering would likely result from evaporation of sea-water droplets. Previous simulations have omitted this mechanism. Using the WRF/Chem model (Weather Research and Forecasting model coupled with Chemistry) in large-eddy simulation mode, we find that droplet evaporation creates cold pools, suppressing initial aerosol plume heights by up to 30% (40m). This lessens cloud albedo increases from 94.1 to 88.5% in our weakly-precipitating case and from 4.3 to 1.4% for daytime injection into our nonprecipitating case (cloud albedo differences of 0.012 and 0.009, respectively). Inclusion of this effect in future modelling would allow increasingly realistic effectiveness estimates.
Original language | English |
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Pages (from-to) | 164-169 |
Number of pages | 6 |
Journal | Atmospheric Science Letters |
Volume | 14 |
Issue number | 3 |
DOIs | |
Publication status | Published - Jul 2013 |
Keywords
- Cloud seeding
- Cold pools
- Geoengineering
- Large-eddy simulation
- Marine cloud brightening
- Marine stratocumulus
- WRF/Chem