Microphysical Characterization of Aerosol Signatures over Greece

Abstract

A detailed microphysical characterization is presented for aerosol spectra over three major areas over Greece, namely- the Area West of Crete (AWC), the Greater Thessaloniki area (GTA) and the Greater Athens Area (GAA) based on measurements made by Varotsos (2005). Aerosol size distributions along with cloud droplet concentrations were gathered from data collected from the Forward Scattering Spectrometer Probe (FSSP)-300 and Passive Cavity Aerosol Spectrometer Probe (PCASP)-100X flown on a Falcon aircraft over Greece (Varotsos, 2005). However, the microphysical and dynamical characterisation of the observations were left largely unexplored (for this later paper), particularly with regard to their growth and activation into cloud condensation nuclei. A suite of models involving Large Eddy Simulations and an Adiabatic Parcel Model were used to achieve this. The UK Met Office large eddy model (LEM) reveals that mild to moderate updraughts in the range of 0.5 ms-1 to 2 ms-1 were present over Athens during June 1997, over the regions containing the aerosol bands. The sophisticated parcel model was then been applied to this data to study the growth of aerosol in the updraughts present and further, to explore the possibility of rainfall. It is found that the grown droplets have radii spanning a range of 6 μm to 100 μm indicating a hundredfold increase over initial size and the region spanning height from 2700 to 3000 meters contains precipitable water.

Keywords

• urban aerosol
• maritime aerosol
• cloud droplets
• cloud dynamics
• cloud micro-physics