Surface warming in Svalbard may have led to increases in highly active ice-nucleating particles
Yutaka Tobo, Kouji Adachi, Kei Kawai, Hitoshi Matsui, Sho Ohata, Naga Oshima, Yutaka Kondo, Ove Hermansen, M. Uchida, Jun Inoue, M. Koike
Abstract
Abstract The roles of Arctic aerosols as ice-nucleating particles remain poorly understood, even though their effects on cloud microphysics are crucial for assessing the climate sensitivity of Arctic mixed-phase clouds and predicting their response to Arctic warming. Here we present a full-year record of ice-nucleating particle concentrations over Svalbard, where surface warming has been anomalously faster than the Arctic average. While the variation of ice-nucleating particles active at around −30 °C was relatively small, those active at higher temperatures (i.e., highly active ice-nucleating particles) tended to increase exponentially with rising surface air temperatures when the surface air temperatures rose above 0 °C and snow/ice-free barren and vegetated areas appeared in Svalbard. The aerosol population relevant to their increase was largely characterized by dust and biological organic materials that likely originated from local/regional terrestrial sources. Our results suggest that highly active ice-nucleating particles could be actively released from Arctic natural sources in response to surface warming.