Office of Science-Sponsored Field Experiments will be highlighted at the American Geophysical Union’s (AGU’s) Annual Meeting in San Francisco, December 2008

Summary

The American Geophysical Union (AGU) will highlight two coordinated DOE field experiments in a special session at the December AGU meeting. These two experiments focused on fair-weather clouds (FWC) that are generally small in size, ubiquitous, and occurring over large areas of continents, such as the Southern Great Plains in Oklahoma and in the trade wind regions over the oceans. These clouds play an important role in the Earth’s climate by reflecting the sun’s energy away from the planet. The special session will present results from the Cumulus Humilis Aerosol Processing Study (CHAPS), that examined the interactions of aerosols on clouds and of clouds on aerosols, and the Cloud and Land Surface Interaction Campaign (CLASIC), that investigated how land surface processes influence cumulus convection. These studies, conducted during Junhttp://acrf-campaign.arm.gov/clasic/e 2007, employed 11 aircraft and were sponsored by the Office of Science’s Atmospheric Science Program (ASP) and the Atmospheric Radiation Measurement (ARM) Climate Research Facility, respectively. NASA, NOAA, and the U.S. Department of Agriculture also participated in and supported CLASIC.