CAICE Investigator Paul DeMott will be part of a team of atmospheric scientists that will be based in Hobart, Tasmania for six weeks to collect cloud, aerosol and precipitation data over the Southern Ocean during a research project called the Southern Ocean Clouds, Radiation, Aerosol Transport Experimental Study (SOCRATES).
For this field study in the ambient atmosphere, the DeMott group will be collecting online and offline measurements of ice nucleating particles and bioaerosols from ship and aircraft platforms over Southern Ocean regions.
Paul DeMott explained the project: “In certain meteorological situations, we believe that ocean emissions are the primary seeds for clouds and that this has strong implications to cloud phase and lifetimes. Our goal is to understand the source of biases in global climate models that allow too much shortwave energy to reach the ocean surface compared to observations at higher southern latitudes. It is a unique environment to test our understanding from CAICE laboratory studies of how ice nucleating particles, especially those from sea spray, influence clouds and climate”.
More information about the SOCRATES project can be found at the link below