Flying laboratory measuring cloud chemistry above Australia aims to improve climate model predictions

Cumulus clouds from above [image credit: Jakec @ Wikipedia]

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The German scientists are engaged in an ongoing project intended to help refine climate modelling. One sums up their approach: “To predict it, we really need to understand it.” But ideally that understanding, if or when it occurs, should have preceded many of the dire claims already put forward that the global climate is going downhill due to human activities. Such biases could be a hindrance to research.
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A team of German scientists have been circling the skies above northern Australia and the Pacific Ocean in a high-tech research aircraft studying the atmospheric chemistry occurring above the clouds, says ABC News.

The Chemistry of the Atmosphere: Field Experiment (CAFE) team has tracked weather events and taken samples and measurements up to 15 kilometres above sea level.

Professor Mira Pöhlker from the Leibniz Institute for Tropospheric Research and Max Planck Institute for Chemistry said the team’s research would help refine weather and climate models leading to better forecasts and projections.

“This really helps us to understand the [climate] systems better to better predict how it will change in the future,” Professor Pöhlker said.

The CAFE-Pacific mission is the third research project of its kind, with atmospheric studies undertaken in the skies over Africa and South America from 2018.

Southern skies ‘exciting’ to explore
The region offshore from Australia’s north-east is of particular interest to the CAFE team for its high ocean temperature, which causes the strongest high-reaching convection in the world.

It produces columns of upward-rising warm air, which act as highways for heat, moisture, particulates, and gasses to be transported from the surface of the planet high into the atmosphere.

Dr Clara Nussbaumer, a postdoctoral researcher working on the project, said the tropics were an exciting place to explore as an atmospheric scientist.

“The combination of intense solar radiation, mixing due to convection, large regional differences in lightning activity, and contrasting tropical waters and the Australian continent, means there’s everything you need for a lot of interesting atmospheric chemistry to occur,” she said.

Regions in the southern hemisphere, including Australia and the Pacific, have been specifically chosen due to their remoteness.

“We can sample the air and do some comparisons [to the northern hemisphere, which allows us] to make some projections on what it could look like with ongoing greenhouse gas emissions.”

Professor Pöhlker said there were many more people in the northern hemisphere.

“If we want to understand how human beings influence all the processes, we need to get that contrast, which we’re able to do here,” she said.

Full article here.

Image: Cumulus clouds from above [credit: Jakec @ Wikipedia]