Local Droplet Size Distribution Measurements in Stratocumulus Clouds: New Insights (Invited)

Holographic observations from the ACE-ENA campaign have led to new perspectives on the structure of cloud drop size distributions within marine stratocumulus clouds. In this presentation, we show data gathered by the Holographic Detector for Clouds (Holodec) during the campaign and use these data to learn about the nature of cloud droplet size distributions from cm to km spatial scales. In addition to showing that the size distributions vary spatially within a cloud and that the “local” measurements of these distributions almost never replicate the “global” (cloud-averaged) distribution shape, we extend these results to investigate the differences between local size distributions, identify the spatial scales where a particular local size distribution has been observed to be dominant, and discuss what these observations may imply for estimations of cloud process rates.