Southern Ocean Clouds (SOC)

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Understanding the key processes driving the climate system and reducing the uncertainties in climate sensitivity is crucial if we want to improve climate projections. The Southern Ocean is an area where there are large biases in the representation of short and long wave fluxes and in the surface temperture - it is thought that poor representation of clouds, both at the micro- and at the macro-scale, is responsible for these errors. This proposal will use a novel multi-scale, multi-platform approach over a variety of temporal and spatial scales that will improve understanding of aerosol and cloud microphysics over regions with maximum climate model bias, namely both the Southern Ocean and coastal areas around Antarctica, leading to better representation of these processes in climate models.Observations will be made at land stations in the Antarctic and Sub Antarctic as well measurements on the BAS ship that crosses Southern Ocean many times in the course of a season and observations using BAS's instrumented aircraft. The aim of the observations is to identify the compostions and source of the aerosols that act as cloud forming nuclei. This information will be used to improve the representation of clouds in numerical models.