Relationships of biomass-burning aerosols to ice in orographic wave clouds

When clouds with influence from colder temperatures were excluded from the dataset, mean ice nuclei and cloud ice number concentrations were very low, on the order of 1-5 L⁻¹. In this environment, ice number concentrations were found to be significantly correlated with the number concentration of larger particles, those larger than both 0.1- and 0.5-μm diameter.

A variety of complementary techniques was used to measure aerosol size distributions and chemical composition. Strong correlations were also observed between ice concentrations and the number concentrations of soot and biomass-burning aerosols. Ice nuclei concentrations directly measured in biomass-burning plumes were the highest detected during the project.