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The COMBLE campaign: a study of marine boundary-layer clouds in Arctic cold-air outbreaks

Journal Article · · Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society
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  1. Univ. of Wyoming, Laramie, WY (United States)
  2. Brookhaven National Lab. (BNL), Upton, NY (United States)
  3. Univ. of Oklahoma, Norman, OK (United States)
  4. National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), Boulder, CO (United States)
  5. United Kingdom Meteorological Office, Exeter, Devon (United Kingdom)
  6. Pacific Northwest National Lab. (PNNL), Richland, WA (United States)
  7. Univ. of Cologne (Germany)
  8. Colorado State Univ., Fort Collins, CO (United States)
  9. NASA Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC), Greenbelt, MD (United States)
  10. Brookhaven National Lab. (BNL), Upton, NY (United States); Stony Brook Univ., NY (United States)
  11. Alfred Wegener Inst. for Polar and Marine Research, Bremerhaven (Germany)
  12. Los Alamos National Lab. (LANL), Los Alamos, NM (United States)
  13. Univ. of Colorado, Boulder, CO (United States); National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), Boulder, CO (United States)
  14. University of Bergen, Bergen, Norway
  15. Stockholm Univ. (Sweden)
  16. Argonne National Lab. (ANL), Argonne, IL (United States)
  17. State Univ. of New York, Oswego, NY (United States)
  18. Univ. of Leipzig (Germany)
+ Show Author Affiliations
One of the most intense air mass transformations on Earth happens when cold air flows from frozen surfaces to much warmer open water in cold-air outbreaks (CAOs), a process captured beautifully in satellite imagery. Despite the ubiquity of the CAO cloud regime over high-latitude oceans, we have a rather poor understanding of its properties, its role in energy and water cycles, and its treatment in weather and climate models. The Cold-air Outbreaks in the Marine Boundary Layer Experiment (COMBLE) was conducted to better understand this regime and its representation in models. COMBLE aimed to examine the relations between surface fluxes, boundary-layer structure, aerosol, cloud and precipitation properties, and mesoscale circulations in marine CAOs. Processes affecting these properties largely fall in a range of scales where boundary-layer processes, convection, and precipitation are tightly coupled, which makes accurate representation of the CAO cloud regime in numerical weather prediction and global climate models most challenging. COMBLE deployed an Atmospheric Radiation Measurement Mobile Facility at a coastal site in northern Scandinavia (69°N), with additional instruments on Bear Island (75°N), from December 2019 to May 2020. CAO conditions were experienced 19% (21%) of the time at the main site (on Bear Island). A comprehensive suite of continuous in situ and remote sensing observations of atmospheric conditions, clouds, precipitation, and aerosol were collected. Because of the clouds’ well-defined origin, their shallow depth, and the broad range of observed temperature and aerosol concentrations, the COMBLE dataset provides a powerful modeling test bed for improving the representation of mixed-phase cloud processes in large-eddy simulations and large-scale models.
Research Organization:
Argonne National Laboratory (ANL), Argonne, IL (United States); Brookhaven National Laboratory (BNL), Upton, NY (United States); Oak Ridge National Lab. (ORNL), Oak Ridge, TN (United States). Atmospheric Radiation Measurement (ARM) Data Center; Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL), Richland, WA (United States)
Sponsoring Organization:
German Research Foundation (DFG); USDOE Office of Science (SC); USDOE Office of Science (SC), Biological and Environmental Research (BER); View Organization DOE Office of Science Atmospheric Radiation Measurement (ARM) Program (United States)
Grant/Contract Number:
AC02-06CH11357; AC05-76RL01830; SC0012704; SC0018626; SC0018927; SC0019251; SC0020171; SC0021116; SC0021151; SC0021159
OSTI ID:
1847908
Alternate ID(s):
OSTI ID: 1868512
OSTI ID: 1876700
OSTI ID: 1991305
Report Number(s):
BNL-222991-2022-JAAM; PNNL-SA-170594
Journal Information:
Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, Journal Name: Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society Journal Issue: 5 Vol. 103; ISSN 0003-0007
Publisher:
American Meteorological SocietyCopyright Statement
Country of Publication:
United States
Language:
English

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54 ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES
Arctic
aerosol-cloud interaction
cloud resolving models
cloud water/phase
cold air surges
marine boundary layer