Radiative properties of humidified aerosols in cloudy environment

The remotely sensed aerosol retrievals in the transition zone between clouds and clear sky ("the twilight zone") are affected by aerosol humidification, undetectable clouds, and complex cloud radiative 3D effects. Recent studies that have estimated this total effect, found a strong exponential dependence of the aerosol retrievals on the distance from the nearest cloud, up to 30 km. In this study, we estimate the net effect of aerosol humidification on the aerosol optical depth (AOD) and aerosol fine-mode fraction (FMF). For this purpose, a new parameterization of the relative humidity (RH) as a function of the distance from the nearest cloud is presented, and calculated for shallow warm Cumulus cloud fields, based on large eddy simulation results. The results show an exponential increase in the relative humidity near clouds, from its background values (far from clouds), with an e-fold exponential distance scale of 90-300 m from the cloud edge. This finding suggests that at least for warm Cumulus cloud fields, the variations of the mean RH values are negligible at distances larger than similar to 0.5 km from clouds, when taking into account humidification effects and therefore, the total effect of the twilight zone on aerosol retrievals is not dominated by aerosol humidification at distances of 0.5-30 km from clouds. Closer examination of the aerosol humidification effect on aerosol retrievals near clouds is then presented, using a radiative transfer model (SHDOM). We estimate the sensitivity of humidified aerosol retrievals to the physical aerosol properties. We show that the humidified aerosol optical depth (AOD) is constantly increasing near clouds, for all aerosol types and size distributions, due to aerosol hygroscopic growth. On the contrary, the humidified aerosol fine-mode fraction (FMF) is found to be sensitive to the aerosol physical properties, showing variant shapes near clouds. (C) 2012 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.