92nd American Meteorological Society Annual Meeting (January 22-26, 2012)

Tuesday, 24 January 2012: 4:00 PM
Aerosol Impacts on Deep Convection; Severe Storms and Tropical Cyclones (invited)
Room 244 (New Orleans Convention Center )
William R. Cotton, Colorado State University, Fort Collins, CO

In the last few years our group has been involved in the simulation of aerosol impacts on deep convection including ordinary thunderstorms, severe tornadic and hail-producing storms, and tropical cyclones. In this paper I summarize the results of those studies. One thing that we see time and again is that the response to aerosol forcing in deep convective clouds and cloud systems is by no means simple. These cloud systems are highly nonlinear and as a result the response varies greatly depending on detailed local conditions and where and when the aerosol plume enters the storm. This means that representing aerosol impacts on deep convection in large-scale climate models is quite challenging because from the perspective of those models, the response of deep convection to aerosol forcing can be quite random, or unpredictable.

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