Quick search Find article
Quick search
Find article

The fate of volatile chemicals during wet growth of a hailstone

Focus on Connections between Atmospheric Chemistry and Snow and Ice

Ryan Michael and Amy L Stuart1

Show affiliations


Part of Focus on Connections between Atmospheric Chemistry and Snow and Ice

We develop and apply a mechanistic model for the study and prediction of volatile chemical partitioning during wet growth of a hailstone. The model estimates the fraction of a chemical's mass in the impinging drops that is retained in a two-phase hailstone. It is derived from mass and rate balances over solute and water for steady accretion conditions. We applied the model using a modified Monte Carlo ensemble simulation approach to study the impact of chemical, environmental, and hail-specific input variables on the predicted retention fraction for six atmospherically relevant volatile chemical species, sulfur dioxide, hydrogen peroxide, ammonia, nitric acid, formaldehyde, and formic acid. Individual input variables found to significantly influence retention are the ice–liquid interface supercooling, the liquid water content of the hail, and the effective Henry's constant. The retention fraction increased with increasing values of these variables. Conversely, the ice–liquid distribution coefficient and hail diameter were found to have negligible effects on solute retention. The overall range of simulated retention fraction was from 1 × 10−8 to 1, while ensemble mean retentions for fixed values of individual input variables ranged from 9 × 10−7 to 0.3. No single variable was found to control the extremes; rather they are due to combinations of model input variables.


PACS

92.60.Jq Water in the atmosphere (humidity, clouds, evaporation, precipitation)

92.60.Nv Cloud physics; stratus and cumulus clouds

92.60.hf Tropospheric composition and chemistry, constituent transport and chemistry

Subjects

Environmental and Earth science

Dates

Issue 1 (January-March 2009)

Received 11 September 2008, accepted for publication 28 November 2008

Published 13 January 2009



  1. The fate of volatile chemicals during wet growth of a hailstone

    Ryan Michael and Amy L Stuart 2009 Environ. Res. Lett. 4 015001

  2. Introducing FACETS, the Framework Application for Core-Edge Transport Simulations

    J R Cary et al 2007 J. Phys.: Conf. Ser. 78 012086

  3. A model for calculating the effect of nanosized pores on refractive index, thermal shift and mechanical stress in optical coatings

    Olaf Stenzel 2009 J. Phys. D: Appl. Phys. 42 055312

  4. Laboratory and modeling studies of cloud–clear air interfacial mixing: anisotropy of small-scale turbulence due to evaporative cooling

    Szymon P Malinowski et al 2008 New J. Phys. 10 075020

  5. Properties of the stochastic Gross–Pitaevskii equation: finite temperature Ehrenfest relations and the optimal plane wave representation

    A S Bradley et al 2005 J. Phys. B: At. Mol. Opt. Phys. 38 4259

  6. Analysis of g2 for the cold collision frequency shift in the hydrogen condensate experiments

    C W Gardiner and A S Bradley 2001 J. Phys. B: At. Mol. Opt. Phys. 34 4663

  7. Fabrication of a carbon nanotube-based gas sensor using dielectrophoresis and its application for ammonia detection by impedance spectroscopy

    Junya Suehiro et al 2003 J. Phys. D: Appl. Phys. 36 L109

  8. Boundary slip in Newtonian liquids: a review of experimental studies

    Chiara Neto et al 2005 Rep. Prog. Phys. 68 2859

  9. Evolving practices in environmental scenarios: a new scenario typology

    Angela Wilkinson and Esther Eidinow 2008 Environ. Res. Lett. 3 045017

  10. Continuous variable tripartite entanglement and Einstein–Podolsky–Rosen correlations from triple nonlinearities

    M K Olsen et al 2006 J. Phys. B: At. Mol. Opt. Phys. 39 2515

Related review articles

What's this?
View review articles related to this research to gain an insight into the key trends in this subject area. Related review articles are selected based on PACS/MSC codes, and are no more than three years old.

  1. Solar radiation transport in the cloudy atmosphere: a 3D perspective on observations and climate impacts
  2. Nucleation in the atmosphere

View by subject




Export








Please login to access our web services, or create an account if you don't yet have one.

You must have cookies enabled in your web browser to be able to login.

Username
Password

Forgotten your password? Get a new one here.