Sorooshian Leads NASA Mission On Marine Clouds

CHEE professor Armin Sorooshian is leading a $30M NASA mission to help climate and weather modelers better understand how aerosol particles and meteorological processes affect cloud properties.

The airborne science mission will take researchers on coordinated flights above, through and below the clouds over the western North Atlantic Ocean to study how aerosol particles affect the formation and evolution of clouds.

Researchers on the Aerosol Cloud Meteorology Interactions Over the Western Atlantic Experiment, or ACTIVATE, will use two aircraft – a King Air and an HU-25 Falcon – to amass nearly 1,200 hours of coordinated flight data. This data will also help modelers better characterize how the clouds themselves affect aerosol particle properties and atmospheric lifetime as well as the meteorological environment. The two-month-long flight campaigns will be spread out over the next three years, across different seasons and covering a slew of atmospheric conditions.

"One big advantage of the western North Atlantic Ocean is its meteorological set up," said Sorooshian, ACTIVATE principal investigator. "That's one of the important reasons we picked this region. It's got a wide range of weather conditions, which leads to different cloud types."

ACTIVATE will focus on marine boundary layer clouds – meaning clouds in the layer of the atmosphere closest to the ocean's surface. Those could range from thin stratiform clouds to thicker, deeper and more convective cumulus clouds.