Cloud and Aerosol Characterization During CAEsAR 2014

Abstract:

The Cloud and Aerosol Experiment at Åre (CAEsAR 2014) campaign took place from June to October 2014 at Mt. Åreskutan, Sweden, a remote mountain site in Northern Sweden. The campaign was designed to study the physical and chemical properties of clouds and aerosols under orographic forcing. A unique and comprehensive set-up allowed an in-situ characterization of both constituents at a mountain top station at 1200 m a.s.l. including instruments to measure cloud droplet size distribution, meteorological parameters, cloud residual properties (using a counterflow virtual impactor inlet), cloud water composition and various aerosol chemical and microphysical properties (e.g. size, optical and hygroscopic properties). At the same time, a remote sensing site was installed below the mountain site at 420 m a.s.l. in the immediate vicinity (< 3 km horizontally), with vertical profiling from an aerosol lidar, winds and turbulence from a scanning Doppler lidar, a Sun photometer measuring aerosol columnar optical properties, and a precipitation sampler taking rain water for chemical analysis. In addition, regular radiosoundings were performed from the valley.

Here, we present the results of this intensive campaign which includes approx. 900 hours of in-cloud sampling. Various unique cloud features were frequently observed such as dynamically-driven droplet growth, bimodal droplet distributions, and the activation of particles down to approx. 20 nm in dry particle diameter. During the campaign, a forest fire smoke plume was transported over the site with measureable impacts on the cloud properties. This data will be used to constrain cloud and aerosol models, as well as to validate satellite retrievals. A first comparison to VIIRS and MODIS satellite retrievals will also be shown.