Cirrus Susceptibility to Changes in Ice Nuclei: Physical Processes, Model Uncertainties, and Measurement Needs

Abstract: One of the proposed concepts for mitigating the warming effect of increasing greenhouse gases is seeding cirrus cloud with ice nuclei (IN) in order to reduce the lifetime and coverage of cold cirrus that have a net warming impact on the earth’s surface. Global model simulations of the net impact of changing upper tropospheric IN have given widely disparate results, partly as a result of poor understanding of ice nucleation processes in the current atmosphere, and partly as a result of poor re…