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<front>
<journal-meta>
<journal-id journal-id-type="publisher">EGUsphere</journal-id>
<journal-title-group>
<journal-title>EGUsphere</journal-title>
<abbrev-journal-title abbrev-type="publisher">EGUsphere</abbrev-journal-title>
<abbrev-journal-title abbrev-type="nlm-ta">EGUsphere</abbrev-journal-title>
</journal-title-group>
<issn pub-type="epub"></issn>
<publisher><publisher-name>Copernicus Publications</publisher-name>
<publisher-loc>Göttingen, Germany</publisher-loc>
</publisher>
</journal-meta>
<article-meta>
<article-id pub-id-type="doi">10.5194/egusphere-2026-3946</article-id>
<title-group>
<article-title>Cold-stage system for Impact-initiated Contact freezing Experiments (C-ICE)</article-title>
</title-group>
<contrib-group><contrib contrib-type="author" xlink:type="simple"><name name-style="western"><surname>Chen</surname>
<given-names>Jingchuan</given-names>
<ext-link>https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5200-982X</ext-link>
</name>
<xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff1">
<sup>1</sup>
</xref>
</contrib>
<contrib contrib-type="author" xlink:type="simple"><name name-style="western"><surname>Rai</surname>
<given-names>Upasna B.</given-names>
<ext-link>https://orcid.org/0009-0002-1740-4514</ext-link>
</name>
<xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff1">
<sup>1</sup>
</xref>
</contrib>
<contrib contrib-type="author" xlink:type="simple"><name name-style="western"><surname>McMillan</surname>
<given-names>Kyle A.</given-names>
</name>
<xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff2">
<sup>2</sup>
</xref>
<xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff3">
<sup>3</sup>
</xref>
</contrib>
<contrib contrib-type="author" xlink:type="simple"><name name-style="western"><surname>Davis</surname>
<given-names>Ryan D.</given-names>
</name>
<xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff4">
<sup>4</sup>
</xref>
<xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff5">
<sup>5</sup>
</xref>
</contrib>
<contrib contrib-type="author" xlink:type="simple"><name name-style="western"><surname>Tolbert</surname>
<given-names>Margaret A.</given-names>
</name>
<xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff2">
<sup>2</sup>
</xref>
<xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff3">
<sup>3</sup>
</xref>
</contrib>
<contrib contrib-type="author" xlink:type="simple"><name name-style="western"><surname>Brooks</surname>
<given-names>Sarah D.</given-names>
</name>
<xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff1">
<sup>1</sup>
</xref>
</contrib>
</contrib-group><aff id="aff1">
<label>1</label>
<addr-line>Department of Atmospheric Sciences, Texas A&amp;M University, College Station, Texas 77843, USA</addr-line>
</aff>
<aff id="aff2">
<label>2</label>
<addr-line>Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences, University of Colorado, Boulder, Boulder, Colorado 80309,  USA</addr-line>
</aff>
<aff id="aff3">
<label>3</label>
<addr-line>Department of Chemistry, University of Colorado, Boulder, Boulder, Colorado 80309, USA</addr-line>
</aff>
<aff id="aff4">
<label>4</label>
<addr-line>Sandia National Laboratories, Albuquerque, New Mexico 87123, USA</addr-line>
</aff>
<aff id="aff5">
<label>5</label>
<addr-line>Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology, University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, New Mexico 87131, USA</addr-line>
</aff>
<pub-date pub-type="epub">
<day>28</day>
<month>07</month>
<year>2026</year>
</pub-date>
<volume>2026</volume>
<fpage>1</fpage>
<lpage>27</lpage>
<permissions>
<copyright-statement>Copyright: &#x000a9; 2026 Jingchuan Chen et al.</copyright-statement>
<copyright-year>2026</copyright-year>
<license license-type="open-access">
<license-p>This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. To view a copy of this licence, visit <ext-link ext-link-type="uri"  xlink:href="https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/">https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/</ext-link></license-p>
</license>
</permissions>
<self-uri xlink:href="https://egusphere.copernicus.org/preprints/2026/egusphere-2026-3946/">This article is available from https://egusphere.copernicus.org/preprints/2026/egusphere-2026-3946/</self-uri>
<self-uri xlink:href="https://egusphere.copernicus.org/preprints/2026/egusphere-2026-3946/egusphere-2026-3946.pdf">The full text article is available as a PDF file from https://egusphere.copernicus.org/preprints/2026/egusphere-2026-3946/egusphere-2026-3946.pdf</self-uri>
<abstract>
<p>Ice nucleation by atmospheric aerosols plays a central role in cloud microphysical processes, exerting strong influences on Earth&apos;s radiation balance and precipitation formation. Among heterogeneous ice nucleation pathways, contact freezing induced by aerosol-droplet collisions remains one of the least quantitatively constrained, largely due to the scarcity of experimental approaches capable of directly probing impact-initiated freezing under controlled and reproducible conditions. Here we present the Cold-stage system for Impact-initiated Contact freezing Experiments (C-ICE), a laboratory system developed to enable controlled, repeatable, and size-resolved investigation of contact freezing triggered by particle-droplet collisions. C-ICE combines a fixed supercooled droplet with a precisely conditioned aerosol jet, allowing particle size, number concentration, collision geometry, and thermodynamic state to be independently characterized and experimentally constrained. At the single-droplet level, freezing onset is identified using complementary optical criteria based on breath figure formation and grayscale analysis. Application of C-ICE to silver iodide aerosols reveals sharp frozen fraction transitions over narrow temperature intervals (&amp;asymp;2 &amp;deg;C), with median freezing temperatures shifting systematically toward higher values from -12.6 &amp;deg;C for 200 nm particles to -12.0 &amp;deg;C for 800 nm particles, and to -10.1 &amp;deg;C for the polydisperse aerosol. By integrating a theoretical collision model with experimentally determined collision efficiencies, we constrain the collision efficiency of the C-ICE system, enabling measured aerosol concentrations to be converted into effective particle collision rates onto the droplet. This novel C-ICE system provides a robust method for quantifying impact-initiated contact freezing and advances process-level understanding of contact freezing in clouds.</p>
</abstract>
<counts><page-count count="27"/></counts>
<funding-group>
<award-group id="gs1">
<funding-source>National Science Foundation</funding-source>
<award-id>AGS-2346198</award-id>
</award-group>
</funding-group>
</article-meta>
</front>
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