Applicant

Dr. Silvia Henning
Leibniz-Institut für Troposphärenforschung e.V. (TROPOS)

Project Description 

The Earth’s current climate is changing more rapidly than has been predicted in most scientific forecasts, with the Polar Regions being the fastest warming areas on Earth. Polar Regions have also a strong global impact on climate conditions and therefore affect lives and livelihoods across the world. Despite the progress polar climate research made - poorly understood processes remain; one of those being the aerosol – cloud – climate interaction; which therefore cannot be modelled satisfactory. Clouds and the interactions with the climate system are one of the most difficult components to model, especially in the Polar Regions, due to difficulties in obtaining high-quality measurements. The availability of high-quality measurements is therefore of crucial importance to understand underlying processes and to be able to assimilate them into models. In the first part of the here proposed project we, i.e., TROPOS suggests to extend the existing aerosol measurements at Neumayer III station by in-situ Cloud Condensation Nuclei (CCN) and Ice Nucleating Particles (INP) measurements for almost two years. The captured data such as number concentrations, hygroscopicity, INP freezing spectra etc. will be linked with meteorological information (e.g. back trajectories) and information on the chemical composition of the prevailing aerosol particles for identifying sources of INP and CCN over the full annual cycle. In an optional third year we plan to compare the findings from the Southern Hemisphere to the TROPOS long-term CCN and INP measurements from the High Arctic (available within the here proposed project from the DFG-funded TR 172, AC3, project B04). A result of this project will be a deeper understanding which processes dominate the CCN and INP population in high latitudes. The quantitative information on high-latitude CCN and INP compiled in the framework of the present proposal will be made available open-source to evaluate and constrain global models and satellite retrieval methods.

DFG Programme: Infrastructure Priority Programmes

Term since 2020