Vertical redistribution of moisture and aerosol in orographic mixed-phase clouds

Abstract. Orographic wave clouds offer a natural laboratory to investigate cloud microphysical processes and their representation in atmospheric models. Wave clouds impact the larger-scale flow by the vertical redistribution of moisture and aerosol. Here we use detailed cloud microphysical observations from the ICE-L campaign to evaluate the recently developed Cloud Aerosol Interacting Microphysics (CASIM) module in the Met Office Unified Model (UM) with a particular focus on different parameterisations for heterogeneous freezing. Modelled and observed thermodynamic and microphysical properties agree very well (deviation of air temperature The simulations were further used to quantify the modification of moisture and aerosol profiles by the wave cloud. The changes in both variables are on order of 15 % of their upstream values, but the modifications have very different vertical structures for the two variables. Using a large number of idealised simulations we investigate how the induced changes depend on the wave period (100–1800 s), cloud-top temperature (−15 to −50 °C) and cloud thickness (1–5 km) and propose a conceptual model to describe these dependencies.