Continuous Observations of Aerosol-Cloud-Interaction in Antarctica
The incomplete understanding of the interaction of aerosol particles with radiation, clouds, and precipitation is a key issue in atmospheric research. This is especially the case for the remote region of Antarctica, where ground-based vertically resolved long-term observations of aerosol, clouds and precipitation are scarce and satellite observations are prone to technical limitations. To fill the measurement gap with state-of-the-art observations, Leibniz Institute for Tropospheric Research (TROPOS) will deploy its OCEANET-Atmosphere platform (Griesche et al., 2020) at Neumayer III station (70.67°S, 8.27°W, 40 m a.s.l) between austral summer 2022/23 and austral summer 2023/24. OCEANET-Atmosphere comprises a set of active and passive remote-sensing equipment, such as multi-wavelength polarization and a Doppler lidar, 35-Ghz cloud radar, microwave radiometer, as well as precipitation disdrometers.
The temporal and vertical resolution of the dataset will be on the order of 30 s and 30 m, respectively. The work will be focused on (1) studying the origin, abundance and the characteristics of aerosol above Neumayer III, (2) investigating the impact of surface- and boundary-layer-coupling effects on the characteristics and evolution of low-level clouds, (3) studying the contributions of dynamics (orographic waves), aerosol and meteorological conditions on the partitioning of the ice and liquid phase in clouds over Neumayer III, (4) studying the vertical structure of clouds and its relationship to precipitation formation, and (5) on the evaluation of regional contrasts in the properties of aerosols and clouds and the associated aerosol-cloud-interaction processes by putting the Neumayer III observations into context with existing datasets from Southern Chile, Cyprus, Germany and the Arctic.
Platform: Land-based – OCEANET-Atmosphere
Location: Neumayer III station, Antarctica, 70.67°S, 8.27°W, 40 m a.s.l
Timing: Austral summer 2022/23 and 2023/24
Contact: Martin Radenz (radenz<@>tropos.de)
References:
Griesche et al., 2020, AMT, https://amt.copernicus.org/articles/13/5335/2020/
Radenz et al. 2024 https://doi.org/10.1175/BAMS-D-22-0285.1