Small Ice Particles in Tropospheric Clouds: Fact or Artifact? Airborne Icing Instrumentation Evaluation Experiment

C haracterization of ice-particle concentration, size, and habit is one of the primary objectives of experimental microphysical studies of cold clouds.Ice particles are effective sinks of water vapor, and they can quickly grow into precipitation-sized particles.Most liquid precipitation on the Earth goes through the ice phase before melting into rain or drizzle.The number concentration of ice particles is an important parameter determining the rate of conversion of liquid into ice in mixed-phase clouds.Knowledge of the size distribution of ice particles is of significant importance for numerical weather prediction and climate models.Airborne microphysical measurements of ice clouds are routinely used for verification of remote-sensing instruments such as radars and lidars.Most observations of the size and concentration of cloud ice particles have been obtained using airborne optical particle size spectrometers, which became widely available in the mid-1970s.Since that time, the amount of data describing the microphysics of ice clouds has been progressively increasing.One striking observation about ice clouds has been the omnipresence of small ice crystals with characteristic size less than 100 µm.It has been observed that the ice crystal number concentration is essentially always dominated by small ice particles.Small ice Small Ice Particles in TroposphericClouds: Fact or Artifact?Airborne Icing Instrumentation Evaluation Experiment by a.