Cloud microphysical background for the Israel-4 cloud seeding experiment

Eyal Freud*, Hagai Koussevitzky, Tom Goren, Daniel Rosenfeld

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

14 Scopus citations

Abstract

The modest amount of rainfall in Israel occurs in winter storms that bring convective clouds from the Mediterranean Sea when the cold post frontal air interacts with its relatively warm surface. These clouds were seeded in the Israel-1 and Israel-2 cloud glaciogenic seeding experiments, which have shown statistically significant positive effect of added rainfall of at least 13% in northern Israel, whereas the Israel-3 experiment showed no added rainfall in the south. This was followed by operational seeding in the north since 1975.The lack of physical evidence for the causes of the positive effects in the north caused a lack of confidence in the statistical results and led to the Israel-4 randomized seeding experiment in northern Israel. This experiment started in the winter of 2013/14. The main difference from the previous experiments is the focus on the orographic clouds in the catchment of the Sea of Galilee. The decision to commence the experiment was partially based on evidence supporting the existence of seeding potential, which is reported here. Aircraft and satellite microphysical and dynamic measurements of the clouds document the critical roles of aerosols, especially sea spray, on cloud microstructure and precipitation forming processes. It was found that the convective clouds over sea and coastal areas are naturally seeded hygroscopically by sea spray and develop precipitation efficiently. The diminution of the large sea spray aerosols farther inland along with the increase in aerosol concentrations causes the clouds to develop precipitation more slowly. The short time available for the precipitation forming processes in super-cooled orographic clouds over the Golan Heights farthest inland represents the best glaciogenic seeding potential.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)122-138
Number of pages17
JournalAtmospheric Research
Volume158-159
DOIs
StatePublished - 1 May 2015

Bibliographical note

Publisher Copyright:
© 2015 Elsevier B.V.

Keywords

  • CCN
  • Cloud microphysics
  • Cloud seeding
  • Orographic clouds
  • Precipitation

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