Regular Mass Spectrometric Aerosol Particle Measurements in the Upper Troposphere and Lowermost Stratosphere (AMS-CARIBIC 2)

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Aerosol particles in the tropopause region play an important role in atmospheric physics and chemistry, i.e. for radiative forcing, cirrus cloud formation and properties, and heterogeneous chemistry. However, due to the high technical and financial demands and the extreme atmospheric conditions at the tropopause, measurements of these particles are sparse. In the precursor project of the proposed project (AMS-CARIBIC), an aerosol mass spectrometer (AMS) was developed for regular measurements of aerosol particles onboard a Lufthansa aircraft within the European Research Infrastructure IAGOS-CARIBIC (www.iagos.org). The CARIBIC-AMS was constructed, tested, characterized, and passed all required aviation tests. The instrument is ready for its first measurement flight in May 2017. While the flight operation is already funded for the next two years, and the research infrastructure shall be operated for another 12-15 years, in the present follow-up project we want to evaluate the respective CARIBIC-AMS data and to address two important scientific questions in the course of a PhD thesis. The work plan includes to:- fly the CARIBIC-AMS once per month on four intercontinental flights;- establish automated data quality and data analysis procedures to bring the instrumentinto a routine operation mode;- evaluate the CARIBIC-AMS data by comparison with the established ion beam analysis methods PIXE and PESA;- investigate the role of warm conveyor belts and deep convective clouds for aerosol particle transport into the tropopause region, including the transport efficiency of particulate chemical species;- determine origin and source regions of particulate organic material, interpreting the measured data using model runs with the global atmospheric model ECHAM/MESSy.The obtained measurement data will be evaluated and will be made available to the scientific community via the IAGOS-CARIBIC database.