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What are all the Microphysical schemes available?

Clouds are important for their hydrological, thermodynamical, and radiative effects. That is, they redistribute water all over the globe, transport energy by up-taking and releasing the latent heat, and scatter/absorb solar and terrestrial radiation fluxes.

One question lingering in my mind is: which cloud phase (i.e., ice & liquid) possesses the most cloud water? Ice or Liquid? The reason I am interested in this question is that the understanding of the facts of cloud phase and its representation in climate models are relevant to various key problems, for example cloud microphysics (aerosol-cloud-precipitation interaction) and cloud radiative feedback (how cloud phase change modulates the scattering/absorption properties of clouds in a warming climate).

I have sawn some publications (e.g. Huang et al., 2015, JGR, doi:10.1002/2014JD022779) showing that there is more ice water than liquid water, globally. But I also found the retrieval of cloud water, especially ice water, suffer from tremendous uncertainty. So, I want to hear from the many talented people here, about your knowledge and opinions on this question. Thank you very much.

I am most interested in a coupled problem of a lake-surrounding atmosphere circulation. The submodel of lake circulation is quite sensitive to inputs obtained from WRF such as net and shortwave radiation as well as sensible heat flux. But it seems that WRF-calculated radiation fields are quite sensitive to grid resolution due to their dependancy on mixing ratios of cloud water, water vapor and other microphysics parameters. Therefore does anybody know the relevant studies which evaluate WRF against radiation and sensible heat flux measurements in addition to conventional meteorological measurements on such a small scale?

P.S. For those who are interested in practical applicability of such simulations I can recommend paper https://www.researchgate.net/publication/259466284_Model_based_analysis_of_effectiveness_of_the_engineering_solutions_designed_to_increase_cooling_capacity_of_Tashlyk_water_reservoir_of_South-Ukrainian_Nuclear_Power_Plant?ev=prf_pub

Here is a report about the phenomena one can see regularly in Europe on the satellite images after dust storms in Africa. http://oiswww.eumetsat.org/WEBOPS/iotm/iotm/20100211_dust/report_kollath.pdf

I am not an expert of microphysics and radiation so I am looking for partners who can check that hypothesis which can be read in the above pdf report.

Here you can see a fresh case from today (21.02.2014) morning:

an another case from 28.02.2014.

I want to study sea-salt and sulfate impact on cloud microphysics using satellite measurements during monsoon season. I have assumed that from the references that whenever wind speed in greater than 9 m/s there is production of sea-salt and i have analysed the satellite data but i was confused for sulfate measurements. Is there any proof for the sulfate measurements?

Does anyone know the answer to the above? I was just reading the SPARC July newsletter in which Andrew Gettelman suggested that the tropopause temperature should increase in the future due to climate change because of its effects on cloud in the TTL region. However, many years ago Thomas Reichler and I wrote a paper showing increases in tropopause temperature even for the older CM3-based coupled chemistry climate model runs at GFDL. Broadly, we identified the increase as primarily due to the increased strength of tropical upwelling. This seems to be a robust feature of climate model simulations, related as it is of course to the increased strength of the Brewer-Dobson circulation published by the celebrated author Neal Butchart. Related questions, then, are to what extent do the details of the TTL really matter, and have there been any quantitative changes in climate model predicted tropopause data? Perhaps it's the details of the TTL which give rise to the large scale average that we see in the B-D circulation. Then how good are our models at representing this upwelling change if they are relatively poor at representing the TTL region and cloud microphysics on the scale needed?   

My latest results indicate that conceptual models can be improved by warming rain/snow thresholds for higher cloud bases, or lower relative humidity measured at the surface. Both of which are proxy data indicating a drier atmosphere the hydrometer must fall through.

I have found sources that state the microphysics are different in saturated and unsaturated environments, which gets me about 75% of the way to explaining the findings.

What I need to finish the theory is an article that support latent heat exchange rates (evaporation and sublimation) nearing or exceeding sensible heat exchange rates (melting) to allow snow to occur at warmer and drier surface conditions.

If there is a different explanation, I could look into changing the theory.

If I don't find something by the end of the month I could leave it somewhat unexplained, which is not desirable.