EU project uses drones to detect aerosols in ice clouds

Part of BACCHUS, an EU-funded collaboration exploring the impact of clouds on climate change, it marks the first time drones have been used for this type of vertical profiling. The amount of ice contained within clouds influences the levels of precipitation they can discharge, as well as the amount of radiation between the Sun and the Earth. Natural aerosols such as dust as pollen can play a role in this ice formation in clouds, as can man-made aerosols. Part of the project was to determine the proportion of each.

“We investigated the importance of biogenic (natural or pre-industrial) versus anthropogenic (human-made) emissions for aerosol-cloud interactions in regions that are key regulators of the Earth’s climate, such as the Amazon rainforest or the Arctic,” said project coordinator Professor Ulrike Lohmann, a climate scientist at ETH Zurich.

“Very little data is available for many of these regions, particularly over oceans. To start with we wanted to know what fraction of the cloud is composed of water droplets versus ice crystals and then how this was affected by aerosols.”