Southern ocean aerosols: Sources, sinks and impact on cloud formation and climate

Overview

https://research.qut.edu.au/environment/https://research.qut.edu.au/environment/

Robust prediction of human-induced global warming and future climate requires more accurate climate models. Currently, aerosol-clouds interactions represent the largest source of uncertainty in our global climate models. To reduce this uncertainty, we need a better understanding of aerosol sources, chemical and physical properties, and processes impacting their growth to sizes where they can act as Cloud Condensation Nuclei (CCN) and interact with incoming solar radiation.

The Southern Ocean is a region of the world where climate and weather models, including the ones that inform the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Assessment Reports, perform particularly poorly. They persistently overpredict the amount of sunlight reaching the Earth's surface over the SO, causing an overprediction of sea surface temperatures. This can be attributed to the scarcity of relevant, comprehensive in situ atmospheric observations in this remote region of the world.

Research activities

The overarching aim of this project is to enhance our understanding of processes driving aerosol formation, growth to seeds for cloud droplets, and overall aerosol concentrations over the Southern Ocean and Antarctic regions in order to provide very much needed experimental data for models’ improvements and validation.

This will be achieved by using a comprehensive suite of instruments to measure aerosols, their gaseous precursors and clouds onboard the Australian science ship Investigator and the Australian ice-breaker  Nuyina during 3 scientific Southern Ocean voyages and an intensive land-based campaign at Kennaook/Cape Grim, during 2024 and 2025.

A particular strength and novelty of these measurements will be the use of several field-deployable mass spectrometers for detailed and real-time physical and chemical characterisation of aerosols and their gaseous presursors.The student's focus will be chemical properties of Southern Ocean aerosol and therefore the student will be primarily be working on the real-time mass spectrometry data. However, comparison with other data will be required. The student will have a chance to participate in one or more scientific voyages in 2025.

Outcomes

This research will allow novel insights into chemical composition of Southern Ocean aerosols and their precursors and how they change seasonally and latitudinally.  It will also enable us to investigate how are differences in aerosol chemical composition reflected in cloud properties

Skills and experience

Ideally, you should be a student with a background in either of the following:

• chemistry
• physics
• earth science
• environmental engineering

and have a strong interest in:

• analysis of large datasets
• measurement techniques
• fieldwork.

Scholarships

You may be eligible to apply for a research scholarship.

Explore our research scholarships

Keywords

• climate
• atmosphere
• analytical chemistry
• mass spectrometry
• aerosols

Contact

Contact the supervisor for more information.