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Mineral dust and ice cloud observations from the Infrared Atmospheric Sounding Interferometer (IASI) are used to assess the relationships between desert dust aerosols and ice clouds over the tropical Atlantic Ocean during the hurricane season 2008. Cloud property histograms are first adjusted for varying cloud top temperature or ice water path distributions with a Bayesian approach to account for meteorological constraints on the cloud variables. Then, histogram differences between dust load classes are used to describe the impact of dust load on cloud property statistics. The analysis of the histogram differences shows that ice crystal sizes are reduced with increasing aerosol load and ice cloud optical depth and ice water path are increased. The distributions of all three variables broaden and get less skewed in dusty environments. For ice crystal size the significant bimodality is reduced and the order of peaks is reversed. Moreover, it is shown that not only are distributions of ice cloud variables simply shifted linearly but also variance, skewness, and complexity of the cloud variable distributions are significantly affected. This implies that the whole cloud variable distributions have to be considered for indirect aerosol effects in any application for climate modelling. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The hydrological cycle and its response to environmental variability such as temperature changes is of prime importance for climate reconstruction and prediction. We retrieved deuterated water/water (HDO/H2O) abundances using spaceborne absorption spectroscopy, providing an almost global perspective on the near-surface distribution of water vapor isotopologs. We observed an unexpectedly high HDO/H2O seasonality in the inner Sahel region, pointing to a strong isotopic depletion in the subsiding branch of the Hadley circulation and its misrepresentation in general circulation models. An extension of the analysis at high latitudes using ground-based observations of ̅δD and a model study shows that dynamic processes can entirely compensate for temperature effects on the isotopic composition of precipitation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Photographs of several weather images for May 2013 are presented including the satellite image for 1055 coordinated universal time (UTC) across the British Isles on May 3, the radar image for 2100 UTC in England and Wales on May 14, and the radar image for 1500 UTC in England on May 28.