Ross Herbert

Postgraduate Student

Telephone number: +44(0) 113 34 35605
Email address: lec5r2jh@leeds.ac.uk
Room: 10.128

Biography

Project details

Project title: Modelling studies of the impact of heterogeneous ice nucleation on clouds.

Supervisors: Dr Steven Dobbie and Dr Ben Murray

Start date: 1st June 2010

The size distribution, concentration, spatial distribution and different habits of ice particles in clouds can significantly affect the amount of solar and terrestrial radiation transmitted through the cloud layer and as such can influence the evolution and lifetime of the cloud.

The cold rain process of precipitation can also be very sensitive to the size distribution and concentration of ice particles within mixed phase clouds, where liquid and ice coexist , and is especially important as this process contributes to over 50% of all precipitation in mid-latitude regions and 30% in tropical regions.

 All of these factors can be seen to arise from the initial individual freezing events of the water droplets and therefore the nucleation events that caused this phase change.

The process and variables that lead to this event need to be explicitly understood in order to reproduce this behaviour in models.