Thermodynamics of homogeneous nucleation of mesospheric ice particles

Details Thermodynamics of homogeneous nucleation of mesospheric ice particles Thermodynamics of homogeneous nucleation of mesospheric ice particles

May 2009

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2009agusmsa14a..07z&link_type=abstract

American Geophysical Union, Spring Meeting 2009, abstract #SA14A-07

Physics

0340 Middle Atmosphere: Composition And Chemistry, 1011 Thermodynamics (0766, 3611, 8411), 3360 Remote Sensing

Scientific paper

Although our knowledge of the upper mesospheric region is continuously improving, many aspects of mesospheric dynamics and thermodynamics are still unclear. We address some of these open questions related to the thermodynamics of water at the conditions intrinsic for the polar summer mesosphere. For this we use recently published theoretical and laboratory results on the properties of water at very low temperatures. We present the hypothesis of homogeneous nucleation of ice nano-particles in the polar summer mesosphere. The nucleation of condensed phase is traced back to the first step on the formation pathway, which is assumed to be the transition of water vapor to amorphous cluster. Amorphous clusters then freeze into water ice, likely metastable cubic ice, when they reach the critical size. The estimates based on the equilibrium thermodynamics give the critical size (radius) of amorphous water clusters as about 1.0 nm. The same estimates for the final transition step, that is the transformation of cubic to hexagonal ice, give the critical size of about 15 nm at typical upper mesospheric conditions during the polar summer (about 150K temperature and about 109cm-3 water vapor density).

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