Sorooshian Discusses ACTIVATE Mission in Eos

In an update in the science publication Eos, CHEE professor Armin Sorooshian and his co-investigators wrote about their work to better understand how aerosol particles and clouds influence each other. 

The NASA Aerosol Cloud Meteorology Interactions over the Western Atlantic Experiment (ACTIVATE), uses synchronized aircraft observations over the ocean in different seasons, collecting measurements of gases, aerosols, clouds, and meteorological conditions. Sorooshian is the principal investigator of the  mission.

"The lack of understanding of clouds and their interactions with aerosols represents the largest source uncertainty in climate models, creating an urgency to study them more thoroughly," the team wrote. "Improving model simulations of clouds requires a deeper understanding of how they form and evolve. To guide this understanding, researchers have developed airborne sampling strategies that target air in and around clouds during brief, intensive field campaigns." 

ACTIVATE flights, which began in 2020 and are slated to occur through 2022, are planned for February–March and May–June each year to capture different aerosol and meteorological regimes over the western North Atlantic Ocean. Because the ACTIVATE mission extends over several years, it will be able to acquire repeated samples to observe how aerosols and clouds in the same atmospheric column interact under a variety of conditions.

The article continues: The ACTIVATE team recently completed winter 2021 flights (January–March) and is in the process of conducting flights in the May–June 2021 time frame. Pandemic restrictions are not preventing the team’s ability to execute successful science flights. In addition, extensive analyses of data collected during the 2020 flights are underway, and a workshop is planned for fall 2021 to promote broader use of the publicly available data by the international research community.

Eos is a science news publication by the American Geophysical Union.