Vertical Profiles of Liquid Water Content in fog layers during the SOFOG3D experiment

Abstract. Observations collected during the SOuth west FOGs 3D experiment for processes study (SOFOG3D) field campaign are examined to document vertical profile of microphysical and thermodynamic properties of fog layers. In situ measurements collected under a tethered balloon provide 140 vertical profiles of liquid water content (LWC) from an adapted cloud droplet probe (CDP), which allow an exhaustive analysis of the life cycle of 8 thin fogs (thickness < 50 m) and 4 developed layers. We estimate thin-to-thick transition time from remote sensing instruments (microwave radiometer and Doppler cloud radar) and surface measurements, by using thresholds for longwave radiation flux, turbulent kinetic energy, vertical temperature gradient, fog top height and liquid water path (LWP) values. We found that a LWP threshold value of 15 g.m−2 is more suited for the thick fogs sampled at the super-site. CDP data are used to compute the equivalent fog adiabaticity from closure (αclosureeq) and compare to value derived from remote sensing instruments, 2-m height visibility, and an one-column conceptual model of adiabatic continental fog assuming that LWC linearly increases with height. The comparison of αclosureeq shows a large variability that results mainly from the parameterization used to estimate LWC at ground, but their evolution as a function of the fog thickness follows the same trend. We found larger negative values of αclosureeq for thin layers, associated to low LWP values. CDP data reveal that reverse trend of LWC profile (LWC being maximal at the ground and decreasing with altitude) are ubiquitous in optically thin fogs, while quasi-adiabatic features with increasing LWC values with altitude are mainly observed in well-mixed optically thick fogs. We investigate the actual fog adiabaticity and lapse rate fraction by using linear regressions to best fit the vertical profiles of LWC and temperature, respectively. This analysis highlights that reverse LWC profiles, when stable temperature conditions exist during the optically thin phase of fogs, evolve towards quasi-adiabatic features with slightly unstable temperature lapse rate, when fogs become optically thick. We also found that LWC at ground is higher during the thin phase and significantly decreases as the profile is changing from reverse to increasing with height. But this trend could be balanced when collision-coalescence and sedimentation processes redistribute the LWC through the fog layer from the top to the ground. This study provides new insights on the evolution of LWC profile during the fog life cycle, that would help to constrain numerical simulations.