Aerosol indirect effects on glaciated clouds. Part I: Model description

The strength of this aerosol-cloud model is in its ability to explicitly resolve all the known modes of heterogeneous cloud droplet activation and ice crystal nucleation. The model links cloud particle activation with the aerosol loading and chemistry of seven different aerosol species.

These improvements to the model resulted in more accurate prediction especially of droplet and ice crystal number concentrations in the upper troposphere and enabled the model to directly sift the aerosol indirect effects based on the chemistry and concentration of the aerosols. In addition, continental and maritime cases were simulated for the purpose of validating the aerosol-cloud model and for investigating the critical microphysical and dynamical mechanisms of aerosol indirect effects from anthropogenic solute and solid aerosols, focusing mainly on glaciated clouds.