In this paper the influence of smoke-haze aerosols
released from the vegetation and peat fires in
Indonesia during 1997/1998 on cloud properties
and precipitation formation is investigated. The
goal of this study is to analyse local to regional
modifications of atmospheric properties over Indonesia,
like the suppression of precipitation in
smoke-haze regions (Rosenfeld, 1999) and the
potential prolongation of smoke-haze episodes, or
contrarily, increased precipitation lee side of the
fires (Andreae et al., 2004) with potential heavy
precipitation events. A regional climate-chemistry/
aerosol model is used for this purpose. The model
set-up to investigate aerosol–cloud interactions over
Indonesia is introduced in Section 2. Section 3
presents the model simulation results and Section 4
shows a comparison with observational data. In
Section 5 model sensitivity experiments are discussed.
Conclusions and an outlook are given in the
final Section 6.