Impacts of Aerosol Particle Size Distribution and Land Cover Land Use on Precipitation in a Coastal Urban Environment Using a Cloud-Resolving Mesoscale Model

Authors

Nathan Hosannah, CUNY City CollegeFollow
Jorge Gonzalez, CUNY City CollegeFollow

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

1-14-2014

Abstract

Urban environments influence precipitation formation via response to dynamic effects, while aerosols are intrinsically necessary for rainfall formation; however, the partial contributions of each on urban coastal precipitation are not yet known.Here, the authors use aerosol particle size distributions derived from the NASA aerosol robotic network (AERONET) to estimate submicron cloud condensation nuclei (CCN) and supermicron CCN (GCCN) for ingestion in the regional atmospheric modeling system (RAMS). High resolution land data from the National Land Cover Database (NLCD) were assimilated into RAMS to provide modern land cover and land use (LCLU).Thefirst two of eight total simulationswere month long runs for July 2007, one with constant PSDvalues and the second with AERONET PSDs updated at times consistent with observations. The third and fourth runs mirrored the first two simulations for “No City” LCLU. Fourmore runs addressed a one-day precipitation event under City andNoCity LCLU, and two different PSD conditions. Results suggest that LCLU provides the dominant forcing for urban precipitation, affecting precipitation rates, rainfall amounts, and spatial precipitation patterns. PSD then acts to modify cloud physics. Also, precipitation forecasting was significantly improved under observed PSD and current LCLU conditions.

Comments

This article was originally published in Advances in Meteorology, available at DOI: 10.1155/2014/904571.

This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License.