Incorporation of advanced aerosol activation treatments into CESM/CAM5: model evaluation and impacts on aerosol indirect effects

Abstract

Abstract. One of the greatest sources of uncertainty in the science of anthropogenic climate change is from aerosol-cloud interactions. The activation of aerosols into cloud droplets is a direct microphysical link between aerosols and clouds; parameterizations of this process realistically link aerosol with cloud condensation nuclei (CCN) and the resulting indirect effects. Small differences between parameterizations can have a large impact on the spatiotemporal distributions of activated aerosols and the resulting cloud properties. In this work, we incorporate a series of aerosol activation schemes into the Community Atmosphere Model version 5.1.1 within the Community Earth System Model version 1.0.5 (CESM/CAM5), which include factors such as insoluble aerosol adsorption, giant cloud condensation nuclei (CCN) activation kinetics, and entrainment to understand their individual impacts on global scale cloud droplet number concentrations (CDNCs). Compared to the existing simple activation scheme in CESM/CAM5, this series of schemes predict CDNCs that are typically in better agreement with satellite-derived and observed values. The largest changes in predicted CDNCs occur over desert and oceanic regions, owing to the enhanced activation of dust from insoluble aerosol adsorption and reductions in cloud supersaturation from the intense absorption of water vapor in regions of strong giant CCN emissions (e.g., sea-salt). Comparison of CESM/CAM5 against satellite-derived cloud optical thickness and liquid water path shows that the updated activation schemes improve the low biases in their predictions. Globally, the incorporation of all updated schemes leads to an average increase in column CDNCs of 155%, an increase in shortwave cloud forcing of 13%, and a decrease in surface shortwave radiation of 4%. In terms of meteorological impacts, these updated aerosol activation schemes result in a slight decrease in near-surface temperature of 0.9 °C and precipitation of 0.04 mm day−1, respectively. With the improvement of model-predicted CDNCs and better agreement with most satellite-derived cloud properties, the inclusion of these aerosol activation processes should result in better predictions of the aerosol indirect effects.