Aircraft Observations of Atmospheric Aerosols

  • Supervisors: Hugh Coe
    James Allan
    Paul Williams
    Martin Gallagher
  • External Supervisors:

  • Contact:

    Hugh Coe (hugh.coe@manchester.ac.uk)

  • CASE Partner:

Application deadline: 3 February 2017

Introduction:

The Centre for Atmospheric Sciences at the University of Manchester is one of only a few groups globally that has developed a substantial capability for airborne measurement of aerosol particles in the atmosphere. It has developed and installed several instruments on the NERC large research aircraft, a BAe-146 (www.faam.ac.uk) and uses these instruments to characterize the chemical and physical properties. The suite of instruments continues to be developed and utilised in a wide range of projects around the world.  Recent additions to our instrument suite include a counter flow virtual impactor, which samples cloud droplets and ice crystals, dries them and then samples the residual particles onto which the cloud formed.  It is also likely that a new instrument that samples aerosol particles for offline chemical analysis will also be installed on the aircraft (the Particle Into Liquid Sampler, PILS).  The influence of pollution on clouds and their subsequent effect on the Earth’s radiation budget and precipitation formation remains a very important research area and one where large uncertainties remain.  The CVI inlet and the new PILS instrument provide very useful additions to the suite of aerosol and cloud measurements on the aircraft and there will be several opportunities for using these to investigate aerosol-cloud interactions in the coming years including experiments in warm clouds above the mid-latitude Atlantic Ocean, investigating mixed phase and ice clouds in the Arctic and other studies focussed on polluted regions.

Project Summary:

You will make a substantial contribution to at least one of the major aircraft studies taking place in the period 2017-2019.  Initially you will be trained in the operation of a number of instruments on the aircraft and learn how to analyse and interpret data from them. The focus of this PhD can be either to develop and characterize new and existing instrumentation such as the counterflow virtual impactor and the PILS and other instruments that will coupled to it, or to lead the data analysis from one of the forthcoming studies, or a combination of the two depending on your interests. This work is highly collaborative and it is expected that you will working with a large number of UK and international research groups during this work.

References:

Mechoso, C. R., et al.: Ocean-Cloud-Atmosphere-Land Interactions in the South Eastern Pacific, Bull. Am.

Meteorol. Soc., 95, 3, 357-375, doi: 10.1175/BAMS-D-11-00246.1, 2014. 

Shingler et al.: Characterisation and airborne deployment of a new counterflow virtual impactor inlet, Atmos. Meas. Tech., 5, 1259–1269, 2012, doi:10.5194/amt-5-1259-2012, 2012. 

Taylor, J.W., Allan, J.D., Allen, G., Coe, H., Williams, P.I., Flynn, M.J., Le Breton, M., Muller, J.B.A., Percival, C.J., Oram, D., Forster, G., Lee, J.D., Rickard, A.R., Parrington, M., Palmer, P.I. Size-dependent wet removal of black carbon in Canadian biomass burning plumes (2014) Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics, 14 (24), pp. 13755-13771. 

Seinfeld, J.H., Bretherton, C., Carslaw, K.S., Coe, H., DeMott, P.J., Dunlea, E.J., Feingold, G., Ghan, S., Guenther, A.B., Kahn, R., Kraucunas, I., Kreidenweis, S.M., Molina, M.J., Nenes, A., Penner, J.E., Prather, K.A., Ramanathan, V., Ramaswamy, V., Rasch, P.J., Ravishankara, A.R., Rosenfeld, D., Stephens, G., and Wood, R. Improving our fundamental understanding of the role of aerosol-cloud interactions in the climate system      (2016) Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci., 113 (21) pp: 5781-5790, DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1514043113 

Liu, D., Quennehen, B., Darbyshire, E., Allan, J.D., Williams, P.I., Taylor, J.W., Bauguitte, S.J.B., Flynn, M.J., Lowe, D., Gallagher, M.W., Bower, K.N., Choularton, T.W., and Coe, H.   The importance of Asia as a source of black carbon to the European Arctic during springtime 2013 (2015) Atmos. Chem. Phys., 15(20) pp: 11537-11555, DOI: 10.5194/acp-15-11537-2015

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