AEROCLO-sA

The AErosol RadiatiOn and CLOuds in southern Africa project (AEROCLO-sA), supported by the French National Research Agency(ANR), the French Space Agency (CNES) and The French National Centre Scientific Research (CNRS), seeks to evaluate the interactions between aerosols, clouds and radiation in southern Africa, essential for constraining the current generation of numerical weather prediction and climate models, henceforth to understand their role on the regional climate and global climate. The representation of aerosol-radiation-cloud interactions remains among the greatest uncertainties in climate change, and new sophisticated data sets are needed.
AEROCLO-sA is based on a ground and airborne campaign that took place in August- September 2017.
Within, the French Falcon 20 environmental research aircraft of SAFIRE (the French facility for airborne research, an infrastructure of Météo-France, CNRS & CNES)., has performed 10 scientific flights from based in Walvis Bay, Namibia. The aircraft was equipped with different remote sensing instruments, such as the high-resolution backscatter lidar LNG and the demonstrator, called Osiris, of the future 3MI polarimeter on-board EPS-SG , as well as in situ measuring instruments (drop-sondes, aerosol characterization). The Falcon 20 has completed more than 70 flight hours and thanks to the expertise of the French laboratories LISA, LATMOS, LOA, DT-INSU and CNRM many airborne data have been collected. Additional ground-based data were also produced thanks to the complementary participation of IRCELYON and LCE.
This airborne campaign has documented the interactions between aerosols and clouds and studied their impact on radiation. With the additional support of two projects funded by EUFAR (FP7), and the involvement of European researchers from Germany and Greece (TROPOS, NOA), it also provided information on regional sources of pollution such as biomass fires or desert dust Researchers will now analyse these data to improve the representation of aerosols in climate models, to reduce the uncertainty of the direct, semi-direct and indirect radiative effect of aerosols, and their impact on stratocumulus to improve remote sensing algorithms for clouds and aerosols.