Heterogeneous Ice Nucleation in the Tropical Tropopause Layer
2018
Recent laboratoryexperiments have advanced our understanding of heterogeneous ice
nucleation at low temperatures. We use these laboratory results, along with field measurements of
aerosol composition, to constrain a parameterization of heterogeneous nucleation rate dependence on
temperature and supersaturation. We apply this nucleation parameterization in detailed simulations
of transport and cloud formation in the Tropical Tropopause Layer (TTL, ≃14–18 km) constrained by
high-altitude aircraft measurements of TTL cirrus microphysical properties and supersaturation. The model
results indicate that if the abundant TTL organic-containing aerosols were effective glassy ice nuclei (IN),
as indicated by laboratory experiments with simple sugars/acids, then heterogeneous nucleation would
prevent the occurrences of large ice concentrations and large ice supersaturations, both of which are
clearly indicated by the in situ observations. If glassy organic aerosols are relatively poor IN, as indicated by
laboratory experiments with more atmospherically relevant secondary organic aerosol-like composition,
then the simulated ice concentrations and supersaturations are in reasonable agreement with the
observations. C
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