This winter – or better summer in the Southern Hemisphere –
our research at Princess Elisabeth station will restart. Besides the AEROCLOUD
project, for which I will leave to Antarctica, there are three more scientific
projects, in which colleagues of the Royal Meteorological Institute (RMI) are
involved: CHASE, GEOMAG and MASS2ANT. The expedition is organized by the
Belgian Polar Secretariat and its operator, the International Polar Foundation.
As described before, within the AEROCLOUD project (financed by the Belgian Science Policy Office programme BrainBe), the
RMI collaborates with the Catholic University of Leuven and the Belgian Space
Aeronomy Institute in order to investigate relationships between aerosol, clouds,
precipitation and climate in Antarctica. Aerosol particles are necessary for
the formation of clouds, which transport the necessary humidity to Antarctica
for precipitation, which in turn is the only way how the Antarctic ice sheet is
gaining mass. Our range of up to 15 scientific instruments is quite unique in
Antarctica and the gained data will serve to improve regional climate models in
order to better understand how the Antarctic ice sheet will behave in a
changing future climate. This season, I will leave Belgium mid-November and I
will stay until 20 December at Princess Elisabeth station.
The almost five weeks will be filled with the maintenance
and calibration of the aerosol, cloud and precipitation instruments. The
instruments could in general operate whole-year round, but they have been
without power since my last post. Therefore, I will be busy with a lot of checks
if the instruments are working properly and I hope that not too many repairs
will be necessary and that there will be no serious damages. In addition, I
will re-install the Brewer ozone spectrophotometer and the Cimel Sun photometer
on the roof of the station. The Brewer is important to monitor the evolution of
the total atmospheric ozone column (this year’s ozone hole appears to be a
relatively ‘smaller’ one; link) and the incident UV-A and UV-B radiation.
The Cimel measures the extinction of the solar radiation by particles. Further,
I will restart together with colleagues and the station staff the weather
balloon launches in order to derive vertical profiles of temperature, humidity
and wind by radio soundings.
AEROCLOUD is not the only project I will be working on.
There is also the CHASE project (financed by the Belgian Science Policy Office
programme BrainBe), in which my institute and I are collaborating with the
University of Ghent (UGent), the Université Libre de Bruxelles (ULB) and with the Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB). Two colleagues, one of UGent and
one of ULB will stay during the same period as I at Princess Elisabeth station.
Within CHASE we face the challenge to study the chemical composition of
atmospheric particles, collected on filters and within surface snow. We want to
analyse both the organic and inorganic composition as well as conducting
isotopic analyses on the samples. Because the overall aerosol amount in the
Antarctic atmosphere is very low, we will apply pumps which generate a very
high air flow rate (more than 300 L/min) which will be maintained over several
days for one single filter sample. This is in order to gather enough mass on
the filters to guarantee a sufficient signal-to-noise ratio in the analyses. With
the results we will get more insight on the relative importance of, e.g., trace
elements, (persistent) pollutants or micro-nutrients like iron. The chemical
signature of the collected aerosol will help us also to identify the potential
source regions (e.g., Southern Ocean, South Africa or South America) and the
relative importance of natural against anthropogenic sources.
Further, there is another scientific project of RMI going on
at Princess Elisabeth: GEOMAG. Within this project (financed by the
Magnetic Valley initiative of the Belgian state), the RMI is installing a 100-%
automatic ‘magnetic’ observatory in Antarctica, complementing an international
network of respective observatories (INTERMAGNET). It will be the
first complete observatory in an uninhabited environment. The infrastructure
and two instruments have already been installed in February 2015. In February
2018, two colleagues of RMI (from our department in Dourbes) will install the ‘GyroDIF’,
which measures automatically the absolute magnetic field, the reference value
for the more routine measurements of the variations of the magnetic field.
