Microphysical Process Characterization of Mixed Phase Clouds in the European Arctic

The Arctic is warming at twice the global mean rate and shows acute visible signs such as the retreat of summertime sea-ice. The predictive capability of Arctic response to climate change is severely hampered by a lack of understanding on key processes related to clouds. Observations suggest that boundary layer mixed phase clouds (MPC, mixture of liquid droplets and ice crystals) are ubiquitous in the Arctic and persist for several days under a variety of meteorological conditions. The strong impact of MPC on the energy budget stems from their persistence and peculiar microphysical properties which result from a complex web of interactions between local microphysical, radiative, dynamical processes and larger scale environmental conditions and processes. Within the (MPC)2 project, we plan to provide and analyse high quality cloud data to quantify the impact of the microphysical properties of MPC on the surface energy budget and to better understand the life cycle of the mixed phase. The proposed work mainly relies on the statistical analysis of the in-situ cloud microphysical and optical measurements collected during ACLOUD 2017, AFLUX 2019 and MOSAiC 2020 airborne arctic campaigns in the vicinity of the Svalbard Archipelago. State of the art in situ instrumentation (cloud and aerosol) along with airborne remote sensing devices will be used to characterize the spatial distribution of cloud microphysical properties as a function of large scale meteorological and surface conditions as well as aerosol concentrations. We can expect to collect comparable dataset of cloud properties during summertime and springtime to study the influence of environmental properties on the vertical profile of microphysical properties. This new dataset will contribute to the development of cloud parametrizations for models and satellite retrievals and to increase our process level understanding of cloud microphysics.