The roles of the saturation vapor pressure and water vapor partial pressure in controlling different stages of the polar mesospheric cloud season

Details The roles of the saturation vapor pressure and water vapor partial pressure in controlling different stages of the polar mesospheric cloud season The roles of the saturation vapor pressure and water vapor partial pressure in controlling different stages of the polar mesospheric cloud season

Dec 2010

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2010agufmsa14a..06r&link_type=abstract

American Geophysical Union, Fall Meeting 2010, abstract #SA14A-06

Physics

[0300] Atmospheric Composition And Structure, [0320] Atmospheric Composition And Structure / Cloud Physics And Chemistry, [0340] Atmospheric Composition And Structure / Middle Atmosphere: Composition And Chemistry, [0399] Atmospheric Composition And Structure / General Or Miscellaneous

Scientific paper

SOFIE (Solar Occultation For Ice Experiment) daily zonal mean temperature (T), water vapor (H2O), and PMC measurements made from the AIM satellite, have been used to study the roles of temperature and water vapor in controlling the start, end, and PMC variability during the 2007 to 2009 northern summer PMC seasons. A necessary condition for PMCs to exist is that the ratio of PH2O (water vapor partial pressure) to Psat (saturation vapor pressure of the environment) must be greater than one. The start or end date of the season is defined here as the day when the first or last PMC is detected. SOFIE measurements show that these detections generally coincide with days when the daily maximum PH2O/Psat enters or exits the PH2O/Psat>1 domain. At the start or end of the PMC season, Psat, which is controlled only by temperature, rapidly changes by several orders of magnitude from above/below to below/above PH2O, signaling that temperature is in dominant control of entry to or exit from the PMC season. Similar to Psat, the SOFIE measured PMC frequency of occurrence rises/drops rapidly to/from ~100% within a few days, at the start/end of the PMC season. During the main period of the PMC season, on the other hand, Psat is negligibly small compared to PH2O, despite significant changes in temperature. As a result PH2O is in dominant control of the ice mass density variation. At the daily mean SOFIE PMC centroid height, PH2O correlates with the observed ice mass density on a range of intra-seasonal time scales both short and long (i.e., ~daily to monthly). Correlation on a seasonal scale is poor at the start and end of the season, reinforcing the argument that Psat dominates in these stages.

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