A Radar-Shaped Statistic for Testing and Visualizing Uniformity Properties in Computer Experiments

In the study of computer codes, filling space as uniformly as possible is important to describe the complexity of the investigated phenomenon. However, this property is not conserved by reducing the dimension. Some numeric experiment designs are conceived in this sense as Latin hypercubes or orthogonal arrays, but they consider only the projections onto the axes or the coordinate planes. In this article we introduce a statistic which allows studying the good distribution of points according to all 1-dimensional projections. By angularly scanning the domain, we obtain a radar type representation, allowing the uniformity defects of a design to be identified with respect to its projections onto straight lines. The advantages of this new tool are demonstrated on usual examples of space-filling designs (SFD) and a global statistic independent of the angle of rotation is studied

Investigating the vertical extent and short-wave radiative effects of the ice phase in Arctic summertime low-level clouds

Low-level (cloud tops below 2 km) mixed-phase clouds are important in amplifying warming in the Arctic region through positive feedback in cloud fraction, water content and phase. In order to understand the cloud feedbacks in the Arctic region, good knowledge of the vertical distribution of the cloud water content, particle size and phase is required. Here we investigate the vertical extent of the cloud-phase and ice-phase optical properties in six case studies measured in the European Arctic during the ACLOUD campaign. Late spring- and summertime stratiform clouds were sampled in situ over pack ice, marginal sea ice zone and open-ocean surface, with cloud top temperatures varying between −15 and −1.5 ∘C. The results show that, although the liquid phase dominates the upper parts of the clouds, the ice phase was frequently observed in the lower parts down to cloud top temperatures as warm as −3.8 ∘C. In the studied vertical cloud profiles, the maximum of average liquid phase microphysical properties, droplet number concentration, effective radius and liquid water content, varied between 23 and 152 cm−3, 19 and 26 µm, 0.09 and 0.63 g m−3, respectively. The maximum of average ice-phase microphysical properties varied between 0.1 and 57 L−1 for the ice number concentration, 40 and 70 µm for the effective radius, and 0.005 and 0.08 g m−3 for the ice water content. The elevated ice crystal number concentrations and ice water paths observed for clouds, with cloud top temperatures between −3.8 and −8.7 ∘C can be likely attributed to secondary ice production through rime splintering. Low asymmetry parameters between 0.69 and 0.76 were measured for the mixed-phase ice crystals with a mean value of 0.72. The effect of the ice-phase optical properties on the radiative transfer calculations was investigated for the four cloud cases potentially affected by secondary ice production. Generally the choice of ice-phase optical properties only has a minor effect on the cloud transmissivity and albedo, except in a case where the ice phase dominated the upper cloud layer extinction. In this case, cloud albedo at solar wavelengths was increased by 10 % when the ice phase was given its measured optical properties instead of treating it as liquid phase. The presented results highlight the importance of accurate vertical information on cloud phase for radiative transfer and provide a suitable data set for testing microphysical parameterizations in models

Cloud chamber experiments on the origin of ice crystal complexity in cirrus clouds

This is an open access article, made available under the terms of the Creative Commons attribution license CC BY 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/This study reports on the origin of ice crystal complexity and its influence on the angular light scattering properties of cirrus clouds. Cloud simulation experiments were conducted at the AIDA (Aerosol Interactions and Dynamics in the Atmosphere) cloud chamber of the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT). A new experimental procedure was applied to grow and sublimate ice particles at defined super- and subsaturated ice conditions and for temperatures in the −40 to −60 °C range. The experiments were performed for ice clouds generated via homogeneous and heterogeneous initial nucleation. Ice crystal complexity was deduced from measurements of spatially resolved single particle light scattering patterns by the latest version of the Small Ice Detector (SID-3). It was found that a high ice crystal complexity is dominating the microphysics of the simulated clouds and the degree of this complexity is dependent on the available water vapour during the crystal growth. Indications were found that the crystal complexity is influenced by unfrozen H2SO4/H2O residuals in the case of homogeneous initial ice nucleation. Angular light scattering functions of the simulated ice clouds were measured by the two currently available airborne polar nephelometers; the Polar Nephelometer (PN) probe of LaMP and the Particle Habit Imaging and Polar Scattering (PHIPS-HALO) probe of KIT. The measured scattering functions are featureless and flat in the side- and backward scattering directions resulting in low asymmetry parameters g around 0.78. It was found that these functions have a rather low sensitivity to the crystal complexity for ice clouds that were grown under typical atmospheric conditions. These results have implications for the microphysical properties of cirrus clouds and for the radiative transfer through these clouds.Peer reviewedFinal Published versio