Cloud-aerosol interactions remain a key source of uncertainty in projections of the future Arctic climate. The aim of the QuIESCENT programme is to gather Arctic scientists from different disciplines (aerosol and cloud scientists, physicists and chemists, experimentalist and modellers) who will work together to identify key challenges in quantifying cloud-aerosol processes and propose ways to improve knowledge transfer from observations to atmospheric models.
During the 2nd QuIESCENT workshop we identified six research priorities that the community should focus on and advance:
- Understand aerosol sources: while there is a lot of on-going research on local sources, the role of long-range transport also remains not well-understood
- Quantify the relative importance of droplet and ice formation processes in clouds
- Define the natural baseline of aerosol particles in the Arctic
- Enhance vertical profiling measurements of aerosols and clouds
- Obtain more detailed cloud ice particle measurements (e.g. information on shape and habit)
- Enhance observations of the dynamical processes (e.g. vertical velocity) in clouds
To deal with the above research gaps, the workshop participants proposed the following research strategies:
- Increase applications of uncrewed aircraft systems (UAS) for in-cloud measurements
- Enhance integration of the modeling community in the development & design of field campaigns: use of numerical simulations for defining key questions and designing field campaigns.
- Foster collaborations with scientists studying mid-latitude aerosol processes and the global transport of particles and water vapor to better understand the transfer of key quantities from lower latitudes
Workshop outcome:
A paper titled Furthering Understanding of Aerosol–Cloud–Precipitation Interactions in the Arctic (de Boer et al. 2022) has been published at Bulletin of the American Meteorogical Society (BAMS) that summarizes workshop activities, presentations and key findings: https://journals.ametsoc.org/view/journals/bams/103/11/BAMS-D-22-0168.1.xml
Future plans:
During the workshop, the QuIESCENT community decided to extend its scientific objectives to further account for aerosol–cloud–precipitation interactions in the Southern polar regions. For this purpose, we aim to reach out to scientists from currently underrepresented regions, such as Asia and Southern Hemispheric countries.