Please note that this session was withdrawn and is no longer available in the respective programme. This withdrawal might have been the result of a merge with another session.
ITS5.8/AS4.11 | Biological influence and atmospheric processes of cloud formation over the Southern Ocean – recent and upcoming initiatives
EDI
Biological influence and atmospheric processes of cloud formation over the Southern Ocean – recent and upcoming initiatives
Convener: Sonya FiddesECSECS | Co-conveners: Martin RadenzECSECS, Silvia Henning
It is a crucial time to make significant improvements in our understanding of how ocean and ice biogeochemical processes are linked with the atmosphere in the Southern Ocean and around Antarctica. These regions are distant from major anthropogenic sources of pollution and represent the closest thing we have to a pre-industrial baseline, although the Antarctic environment has and will experience change. Complex interactions between ocean and ice biology, aerosol, clouds, precipitation and radiation remain poorly understood, with persistent biases remaining in cloud-radiation processes. This has far reaching implications, affecting our ability to simulate past, present and future climate change.

To address these challenges, many nations are undertaking, or planning to undertake, large field projects in the Southern Ocean and Antarctica to collect much-needed high-quality observations across different regions and seasons. There will be great benefit in coordinating these efforts as much as possible by sharing resources, people, and data across a range of disciplines.

PICCAASO (Partnerships for Investigations of Clouds and the biogeoChemistry of the Atmosphere in Antarctica and the Southern Ocean) is an initiative to facilitate coordination and collaboration between institutions, nations and disciplines. The goal of PICCAASO is to maximise the insights gained from research on the Antarctic and Southern Ocean’s biogeochemistry and its links to the atmosphere, before these regions experience further change.

In this session we invite talks from a range of disciplines, including but not limited to ocean and ice biology, aerosol, clouds, precipitation and radiation processes over the Southern Ocean and coastal Antarctica. We are interested in reports of any recent or upcoming field campaigns, how collaboration can be fostered across the disciplines and how the results of interdisciplinary field campaigns are being used to tackle the long-standing problems of the Southern Ocean cloud-radiative bias.