Improvement of fog forecasting using atmospheric electricity

雾导致航班取消和漫长的日子在世界各地的机场定期。准确预报雾可以最大限度地减少这种干扰，但这对数值天气预报模式提出了重大挑战。一个未被探索的领域，可能有助于提高雾的可预测性，是大气电。大气电场，这是始终存在的全球性，是非常敏感的雾和云滴的存在，并经常显示出显着的变化，直到几个小时前的雾开始和消散。电效应也已知会影响水滴的行为（例如增加小水滴生长的速率），这可能会影响雾持续时间和雾层厚度等属性。传感器技术的新发展意味着我们可以详细研究这些过程，并提高我们对电效应是否可用于雾预报和雾消散方法的理解。该项目将利用新开发的用于云滴和大气电场测量的微型传感器，利用系留气球和无线电探空气球上携带的表面测量和传感器，调查雾和低层云中电变化的空间和时间变化。这些新的测量将用于确定大气电变量是否可以提供增强的雾预测能力，超出标准气象测量的可能性。

Fog causes flight cancellations and lengthy days at airports around the world on a regular basis. Accurate forecasting of fog can minimize such disruption, but this presents a significant challenge for numerical weather prediction models. An underexplored area, which may help to improve the predictability of fog, is atmospheric electricity. The atmospheric electric field, which is always present globally, is extremely sensitive to the presence of fog and cloud droplets and often shows marked changes up to several hours before the onset and dissipation of fog. Electrical effects are also known to affect the behaviour of water droplets (such as increasing the rate at which small droplets grow), which may affect properties such as fog duration and thickness of the fog layer. New developments in sensor technology now mean that we can study such processes in detail and improve our understanding of whether electrical effects can be used for fog forecasting, and fog dissipation methods. This project will utilise newly developed miniature sensors for cloud droplets and atmospheric electric field measurements to investigate the spatial and temporal variability of electrical variations in fog and low stratus clouds, using surface measurements and sensors carried on tethered and radiosonde balloons. These novel measurements will be used to determine whether atmospheric electrical variables can provide enhanced prediction capabilities for fog, beyond what is possible with standard meteorological measurements.