Aerosol-Cloud Interactions

Clouds generally cool the atmosphere and supply the water to grow our food. The CVI and GCVI allow detailed measurements (SEMS, MCPC, PILS) differentiating cloud nuclei from unactivated particles in real clouds.

The GCVI sampled for four months on a Swedish mountaintop for a project focused on aerosol-cloud interactions and contrasting clean marine and polluted air masses.  Special attention was paid to the partitioning of absorbing aerosol between interstitial aerosol and cloud droplets, as well as aerosol removal processes. The project was a collaboration between ITM, the Finnish Meteorological Institute and the Paul Scherrer Institute. During the experiment several hundred hours of aerosol and cloud microphysical data were collected, including key properties of the dried cloud residual CCN from the GCVI.