This is brand new research. We have so little understanding of
clouds in the Southern Ocean. This is the first time we’ll have
this major experiment to look at these special type of clouds,
which exist at temperatures below zero degrees Celsius,
yet they remain as liquid. They’re called supercooled liquid
clouds. To do this research over summer,
we will have 3 main platforms. We’ll have the Aurora Australis,
our icebreaker. We’ll have CSIRO’s RV Investigator,
and we’ll have a United States research aircraft. From the surface
we will have LIDARs and radars on the ships looking at clouds
from from the surface. We’ll also be launching radiosonde
weather balloons over the ocean so that we can get profiles of
temperature and relative humidity all the way from the surface up
to the top of the troposphere. We want to know about them so that
we can produce what we call a climatology, how often they occur,
where they occur, what altitudes they occur, how thick they are,
so that we can then compare these data with output from forecast
models and climate models.