Objective
The development of scientific understanding of the earth's climate system and its variability strongly suggests the need for a better quantification of human influence on climate changes. In particular, gaps and uncertainties in our knowledge of climate forcing by clouds and aerosols limit the progress in modelling the evolution of global and regional climate.
Understanding the processes controlling the radiative properties of a polluted cloud requires the determination of the factors leading to the observed partitioning of chemical species between interstitial and aqueous phases. Only then, a realistic simulation of regional climate response to changes in aerosol concentration and composition can be derived.
Addressing experimentally the issue of anthropogenic influence on clouds requires the acquisition of a chain of data reaching from interstitial particles in the cloudy air via drop size distribution and composition to cloud albedo as measured from above the cloud. Clouds process and react to gases and particles from both below and above the cloud. Thus, physical and chemical information is needed from complementary measurements from below cloud base and from above cloud top. Sub-cloud and super-cloud environment are connected by cloud-dynamical evolution on many scales which require concurrent high resolution meteorological measurements co-located with the optical, microphysical and chemical parts of the experiment. To date, no single platform experiment has been able to cover all these aspects.
Up to now, almost all the observations performed in clouds have been collected with instruments on board of aircraft. There is, however, a severe limitation to this methodology. Clouds are highly inhomogeneous phenomena down to the very small scale of turbulence. With two aircraft, it is possible to ample the same cloud region, but it is not feasible to synchronise both aircraft sufficiently to guarantee hat the remote sensing field of view corresponds precisely to the cloud region sampled by the in situ aircraft. Furthermore, clouds are mainly driven by convection, a process which is basically acting Along the vertical. Therefore, the fluxes of heat, momentum or any scalar in the clouds are principally vertical fluxes. Microphysical evolution which is driven by the release of latent heat, is also strongly correlated to vertical eddies. Aircraft are unable to sample a cloud vertically.
The advent of the Zeppelin with New Technology is opening a new avenue in cloud research. The second of a series of airships constructed presently by Zeppelin Luftschiff GmbH, Friedrichshafen (LZ N07) will be dedicated to scientific applications. Not only will this airship be positionable with a 50 m accuracy above a cloud and thus, above any coordinated ground based activities. It will carry a substantial payload on board while allowing for a platform to be lowered down to a kilometer below the Zeppelin.
in order to exploit the unique possibilities of this new platform we propose the EUROZEP study with the objectives:
I) Construction of a Zeppelin-based system comprising of super-cloud in situ and remote sensing measurements combined with in-cloud and sub-cloud in sit microphysical measurements and samplers for the study of anthropogenic optical modifications of clouds,
II) Proof-of-concept experiment in highly polluted clouds in Northern Italy to derive new information on the anthropogenic influence on the structure, evolution and composition related to cloud radiative properties.
Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: The European Science Vocabulary.
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: The European Science Vocabulary.
- engineering and technology mechanical engineering vehicle engineering aerospace engineering aircraft
- engineering and technology environmental engineering remote sensing
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Programme(s)
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Multi-annual funding programmes that define the EU’s priorities for research and innovation.
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Calls for proposals are divided into topics. A topic defines a specific subject or area for which applicants can submit proposals. The description of a topic comprises its specific scope and the expected impact of the funded project.
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Funding Scheme
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Funding scheme (or “Type of Action”) inside a programme with common features. It specifies: the scope of what is funded; the reimbursement rate; specific evaluation criteria to qualify for funding; and the use of simplified forms of costs like lump sums.
Coordinator
04303 LEIPZIG
Germany
The total costs incurred by this organisation to participate in the project, including direct and indirect costs. This amount is a subset of the overall project budget.