I recently received funding to join the US National Science Foundation Asian Summer Monsoon Chemical Climate Impacts Project, ACCLIP. The plan is to fly out of Japan in summer 2020, to measure air which is carried to very high altitudes and out over the Pacific Ocean by powerful updrafts during the monsoon season from all over Asia. This air often picks up surface level pollution and then brings it to areas that are otherwise very clean, so the chemistry is super interesting. The particles and gases that are rapidly lofted through this monsoon system form what is known as the Asian Tropical Aerosol Layer. It is, as the name suggests, a layer of aerosol particles that sits at very high altitude in the atmosphere. These aerosol particles interact with incoming sunlight. The ones that are made of things like soot (black carbon) absorb a lot of sunlight, warming the air around them. Other that are made up of the things like sulfate and water, reflect a lot of sunlight, especially compared to the dark ocean surface beneath them, and this is a cooling effect.
I’ll be flying instrumentation to measure aerosol size distributions, that is, the number of aerosol particles of different sizes. Colleagues from NOAA Chemical Sciences Division and from the Max Plank Institute for Chemistry, in Germany are flying instruments that can tell what these particles are made of, and so they can differentiate between the more absorbing black carbon and the more reflecting sulfate particles I mentioned above. Between us, we hope to learn a lot about the sources of the particles in this layer, and their effects on climate. I’m also very interested to compare these measurements where we directly target air that contains a lot of recent influence from densely populated regions, to the measurements we made of the most remote air we could find on the NASA Atmospheric Tomography Mission (ATom).
We’ll be flying on the NCAR GV aircraft. This is a new platform for me, so I have a lot of work to do to meet the certification requirements specific to this plane, and to sort out my instruments to work with a new rack layout and inlet system. I also need to get more familiar with the dynamics of the monsoon system, and what others have already learned about it from observations and models.