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  4. Contrasting the ice-nucleating activity of Northern and Southern high latitude dusts

Research project

Contrasting the ice-nucleating activity of Northern and Southern high latitude dusts

  • Start date: 3 July 2023
  • End date: 27 September 2023
  • Funder: NERC
  • Value: £39,450
  • Primary investigator: Dr Mark D. Tarn
  • Co-investigators: Professor Benjamin Murray
  • External co-investigators: Dr Floor van den Heuvel (British Antarctic Survey) Dr Tom Lachlan-Cope (British Antarctic Survey)

Clouds are a major source of uncertainty in climate models, particularly in the Southern Ocean due to large model biases in both short and long wave radiative fluxes. The poor representation of ice-nucleating particles (INPs), atmospheric aerosols that trigger the freezing of supercooled cloud water droplets, may be key to these model biases, hence it is important to better understand the effects and sources of INPs in the Southern Ocean region.

This Synergy project between the NERC CloudSense-funded M-Phase (https://cloudsense.ac.uk/m-phase/) and SOC (https://cloudsense.ac.uk/soc/) projects aims to help address this by:


1.    Improving the understanding of INP types and sources in the Southern Ocean where measurements are sparse and uncertainty in climate models due to INPs and clouds is highest.
2.    Comparing INPs in the Southern (very sparse measurements) and Northern (reasonable number of measurements) high latitudes to determine whether INP model parameterisations and uncertainties are transferable between these regions.
3.    Comparing methods and exchange knowledge for INP analysis to ensure results from the M-Phase (northern high latitudes) and SOC (southern high latitudes) projects are comparable.

This will be achieved by assessing the ice-nucleating ability of a range of samples collected from across Antarctica and testing them using instrumentation used in both M-Phase and SOC.
 

Publications and outputs

EGU General Assembly 2024 presentation:

van den Heuvel, F., Tarn, M., Murray, B., and Lachlan-Cope, T.: Investigating potential sources of Ice Nucleating Particles around the Antarctic peninsula, EGU General Assembly 2024, Vienna, Austria, 14–19 Apr 2024, EGU24-16088, https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu24-1608,