RALI-THINICE: SAFIRE tracks arctic depressions from Svalbard

From August 4 to 27, 2022, SAFIRE is projected at  Longyearbyen airport in Svalbard (Norwegian archipelago located east of Greenland). Indeed, it is from this base that the ATR42 of the French Instrumented Aircraft Service for Environmental Research will take off in order to better understand the Arctic depressions, the cloudy processes within them and their interaction with the pack ice. The flying laboratory carries the RALI cloud remote sensing platform, made up of a cloud Doppler radar, a high-resolution LIDAR and an infrared radiometer; it also carries under its wings microphysical probes capable of directly "in-situ" sampling the water droplets, ice crystals and aerosols it encounters in the air during flight. This deployment of about fifteen specialists in airborne measurement for a month, is done at the initiative of the following French laboratories gathered in the RALI-THINICE project::

LMD : Laboratoire de Météorologie Dynamique
LATMOS : Laboratoire Atmosphères, Observations Spatiales
LAMP : Laboratoire de Météorologie Physique
CNRM : Centre National de Recherches Météorologiques
LAERO : Laboratoire d’Aérologie

For more information, see:

• the  RALI-THINICEproject website,
• the press elease made by CNRS.