Puja Roy

More than half of the total amount of global precipitation originates in the ice phase. It is extremely important to understand the basic ice nucleation processes to improve quantitative predictions of global precipitation and climate change as the formation and presence of ice particles within clouds significantly modify cloud microphysical and radiative properties. 

With supercooled liquid water (SLW) droplets as an important prerequisite to ice formation, cloud droplet temperatures play a crucial role in the activation of ice-nucleating particles (INPs), especially for heterogeneous modes of ice formation like immersion freezing and contact freezing. Studies have shown that the number of activated INPs increases by an order of magnitude for every 5ºC decrease in temperature (Demott et al., 2016). Thus, a detailed investigation into the evolution of droplet temperature and its potential importance in ice nucleation is of paramount importance. My Ph.D. research consists of developing a robust theoretical framework and using numerical techniques to investigate the evolution of cloud droplet temperature (CDT) for a range of environmental conditions and analyzing global cloud-top environmental properties using reanalysis data to determine the spatiotemporal variability of environmental conditions that favor enhanced ice nucleation in clouds.

The results from this study will provide us with valuable insight regarding the importance of a potential ice formation enhancement mechanism. This will help us advance our existing knowledge and understanding of primary ice nucleation processes and will lead us to more accurate representation and analyses of such processes in numerical models and future observations.