Macquarie Island Cloud and Radiation Experiment (MICRE) Ice Nucleating Particle Measurements Field Campaign Report
- Colorado State Univ., Fort Collins, CO (United States)
- University of Washington
- Australian Antarctic Division
The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Atmospheric Radiation Measurement (ARM) user facility Macquarie Island Cloud and Radiation Experiment (MICRE) Ice Nucleating Particle Measurements campaign was aligned as a supplemental activity with the second year of the overall MICRE campaign. The purpose of the supplemental campaign was to provide a first-ever annual cycle of ice nucleating particle (INP) measurements at a Southern Ocean (SO) site, toward the investigation/characterization of sources of INPs in the marine boundary layer as being from the production or primary sea spray aerosol (SSA) emissions versus other long-range transport influences. Furthermore, measuring the variability in INPs seasonally in this region, as this may relate to meteorology and ocean biological processes, is expected to help constrain (via parameterizations) numerical model simulations of cloud phase and regional climate. In concert with other SO studies during the time frame of the campaign (March 2017 to March 2018), MICRE sought to evaluate the hypotheses that SSA INPs represent the major INP source in the SO and, due to their generally less efficient INP activation properties compared to terrestrial sources, that they may directly influence the persistence of supercooled clouds in a unique manner for this climatic region.
These measurements supplemented the original deployment of primarily radiation measurements provided in the ARM MICRE request and the associated Australian Antarctic Division (AAD) Antarctic Clouds and Radiation Experiment (ACRE). Assistance and collaboration was obtained from the AAD, the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization (CSIRO) and the Australian Bureau of Meteorology (BOM). Follow-up plans will include investigations with their additional aerosol, cloud, and radiative transfer measurements. AAD also saw to the transport to Australia and storage of filters at the end of the campaign. The added effort involved an average of twice-weekly collections (a 48-hour and a 72-hour collection) of pre-sterilized, open-faced, polycarbonate filter samples for post-processing of INP number concentrations and tests to analyze the nature of INP sources. Collections were made by AAD technician Emry Thaggard Crocker after online training from our team. Images of the filter sampler and site are shown in Figure 1.
Sampling occurred from an approximate elevation of 4m MSL. Filters were returned frozen to Colorado State University (CSU) at the end of the campaign. Initial processing to obtain INP temperature spectra (0 to -28°C) of the concentrations of INPs active via the immersion freezing mechanism were conducted using the CSU ice spectrometer (IS) instrument systems (Hiranuma et al. 2015; McCluskey et al. 2018). In this method, particles are first removed from filters using ultrapure water while under mechanical agitation. Arrays of the particle suspensions from a portion of filter rinses are then cooled to obtain immersion freezing data per volume of water, and finally are related to sampling volumes to obtain numbers per volume of air following the analysis methods of Vali (1971). A total of 103 filters were collected, including blanks at selected intervals throughout the project. For archival and completion of tasks under this ARM proposal, nearly half of the filter collections (46) were processed for basic temperature spectra, and half of these (23) were also tested for microbial/proteinaceous contributions toward INPs via 95°C pre-treatment of portions of the original suspensions.
- Research Organization:
- DOE Office of Science Atmospheric Radiation Measurement (ARM) Program (United States)
- Sponsoring Organization:
- USDOE Office of Science (SC), Biological and Environmental Research (BER) (SC-23)
- Contributing Organization:
- Colorado State University, Australian Antarctic Division
- OSTI ID:
- 1489359
- Report Number(s):
- DOE/SC-ARM-18-030
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
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