Wind tunnel investigations on riming of ice particles: Retention of water-soluble organics and the influence of turbulence on the growth of graupels.

• Applicant: Dr. Subir Kumar Mitra
• Subject Area: Atmospheric Science
• Term: from 2010 to 2015
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 174758764

In recent years, gaseous and particulate organic species in the atmosphere have received increased attention. Organic compounds are found in cloud and rain water as well as in snow samples. However, the removal processes underlying their scavenging is not adequately enough understood such that these are amenable for integration in numerical models. One possibility via the ice phase would be the retention of organics during riming, i.e. the deposi-tion of super-cooled water droplets on ice particles. During this process, the organic species (or fractions of their amounts) can be transferred into and retained by the ice phase while another fraction is released back into the gas phase. These fractions will be investigated and quantified in wind tunnel experiments where freely floating ice particles and snow flakes are exposed to clouds of supercooled droplets containing organic substances of atmospheric significance. As the most abundant water-soluble organics in cloud water are carboxylic ac-ids and aldehydes the proposed experiments mainly extend over these groups. Another topic of great interest is the influence of turbulence on microphysical processes. The collisional growth of cloud droplets is significantly enhanced by turbulence; therefore, similar results are expected in the case of riming as an analogous process in the ice phase. The determination of the growth rate of ice particles by riming under turbulent conditions is necessary for the – so far not yet available - formulation of more realistic collection kernels (in comparison to the laminar case) for the modeling of cloud physics and chemistry.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants
• Participating Person: Dr. Karoline Diehl