Hi, my name is Matthew Shupe. I'm from the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Science at the University of Colorado at NOAA Boulder. Right now I'm on an icebreaker, in the central Arctic Ocean coming back from Mosaic, the first part of Mosaic. I'm one of the co-coordinators of Mosaic and pretty excited to share some information about this project with you. At mosaic, we have a very extensive atmosphere team doing research on Mosaic facility, and that team is guided by a number of different goals. At the top level, the goal is to understand the vertical and the lateral exchange of all different properties and processes in the Arctic. So this is the exchange of energy, of momentum, of particles, of gases, of moisture. How do these things move vertically and horizontally, and how do they interact with the rest of the arctic system? That's really motivating all components of the research that we do. But within that, we're looking at different parts of the atmospheric system and how those are ultimately driving those exchanges. So I'll touch on a few of the different key pieces that organize some of the work we do in Mosaic. So one of the primary goals we have is to characterize the vertical structure of the atmosphere. So this is the vertical structure of temperature, of moisture and of other properties of the atmosphere. We do that using all sensors, we'll launch balloons into the atmosphere every six hours, we have some balloons that are tethered to a string that we pull up and down. We have remote sensors that sense the surface and look up at the atmosphere, measuring different properties. So this continuous profiling of the atmospheric structure is really important for understanding the overall Arctic system, it's important for our weather forecasting, it's important for model development and so many other aspects. So it's really a foundational part of what we do. Another key part is profiling of the dynamics of the arctic system. So the dynamics would be the winds and the turbulence in the atmosphere and how that affects other processes. So one important aspect there is that the winds are blowing on the surface and they move the sea ice, and they lead to sea ice dynamics themselves. So we have to understand winds all the way from the surface up into the higher atmosphere where the local system is interacting with the large-scale atmospheric circulation. To do that, we have a number of centers at the surface again, looking up. So these are lasers, so different kind of Lidar systems, a Sodar, which make sound, radars all getting signals reflected off of the atmosphere, to come back down to our Systems and tell us about the winds at different heights in the atmosphere, and of course, we're launching balloons as well that tell us about winds. We have all kinds of probes near the surface to look at that interface between the atmosphere and the surface and what the winds are going there. Another really important part is gas transfer. So there are all kinds of gases in the arctic system. They're related to things like the carbon cycle, they're related to respiration from biology. They're interacting across the whole system, and there's this gas transfer that happens through the sea ice and ocean surface and into the atmosphere and vice versa. So we're really interested in that flux of gases across the surface. To measure those, we use a number of different air samples that go into different laboratory instruments that look at Trace Gas amounts so say, carbon dioxide or methane, or ozone or other gases. We also deploy flux chambers that sit on the surface that measure a captive chunk above the surface and look at the change of concentration of a gas that's coming through that surface. So this is really important to understand the interaction between the atmosphere and say, the biology and the biogeochemistry of the Arctic ocean and sea ice. Building form the gases, we are very much interested in looking at aerosols as well. Aerosols are little teeny particles in the atmosphere. These are the seeds per Cloud growth, and they are all around us all the time, and they're really important to understand the number of those particles in the atmosphere, how big they are, what they're made of, where they come from. There are so many questions we have about arctic air cells that we just don't really know, we haven't been there to observe the aerosols enough in the past. So to sample aerosols at mosaic, we're going to take a lot of air samples through inlets that go inside to some instruments that are pulling off of those inlets and taking little bits of air in to look at the properties of that air, to look at those particles themselves and their individual properties, how they interact with radiation, what kind of chemical compounds compose those particles, what are some of the gases that are related to those particles that might actually lead to the growth of those particles. Then importantly, we're interested in how those particles interact with clouds. Would moisture in the atmosphere to form clouds to form precipitation, so what's their cloud activity. So we've got individual instruments to look at all those different types of behaviors of aerosol particles that will help us to achieve our goal of understanding arctic aerosols. Another key goal for mosaic is to understand the clouds themselves. Clouds in the Arctic are really fantastic. They're composed of ice crystals, but also of liquid water drops, and often those liquid water drops are at temperatures below the freezing point. It's pretty amazing actually. Clouds are so abundant in the Arctic and they play a really important role in energy transfer, say of sunlight reaching the surface or trapping the earth's terrestrial radiation. So we want to understand clouds and MOSAIC has the most extensive Suite of Cloud observing instruments that we've ever assembled in the central Arctic. So that's really exciting to look at clouds. The Suite includes all kinds of radars and Lidars that are sending signals up into the atmosphere that scatter off the clouds and come back to us to tell us about the properties of the clouds. We have passive instruments that are measuring radiation at different wavelengths. That also tells us how much water mass is in the clouds or how big are the particles there. So these are all really important for us to characterize the full breadth of cloud properties and also their relationship to some of the other properties like the dynamics in the atmosphere. How do clouds and turbulence interact to sustain cloud lifetimes? So these are really important foundational questions we have related to our goal of characterizing clouds at mosaic. Related to the clouds are goals about characterizing and really quantifying the amount of precipitation there. So precipitation is a sink of moisture from the atmosphere going down to the surface, but it's also a source of snow on the surface, and that snow on the surface is really important for the sea ice life cycle, for the growth and melting of sea ice. So snow plays a number of really important roles in the arctic system. We're quantifying that with, again, a number of different devices. We have some devices at the surface that are collecting snow and weighing it, so how much total weight or how much total mass of snowballs reaching the surface. We have other systems that are counting particles, that are looking at the particle shapes. We have some systems that look at very high-resolution videos, like snow flux that are falling so we can understand the shape of the crystals and how they fall, how fast they remove themselves from the atmosphere. Of course, we have radars that will do profiles of precipitation vertically, and we'll see how all these different pieces are linked together to tell us this comprehensive story of the snowfall that's occurring out of the sea ice, at mosaic. Then one of our last goals and really important goals is energy transfer at the surface. The surface energy budget and all the different terms that are related to that. These are radiation from the sun or from other sources. This is turbulent mixing of temperature and energy near the surface. This is the conduction of heat through the sea ice and out of the sea ice. Together, all those terms comprise the surface energy budget. That energy budget is accumulating all this information from the atmosphere above and it really represents that whole exchange of the atmosphere with the surface, and then relates to things like, what's happening within the sea ice? What's happening to the temperature of the sea ice? What's happening to the melting or freezing of the sea ice? So this is a really important integrator of this overall atmospheric impact on the surface. To measure the surface energy budget, we have a number of radiometers that measure radiation at different wavelengths. We have anemometers that measure turbulent wind speeds. We have flux plates that measure the total amount of flux of energy across an interface right near the surface. We do this at some meteorological towers. We make some measurements like this on tether balloons, and we make measurements on these sleds that we've built that have been deployed at different locations around the mosaic facility to provide a spatial perspective on how these fluxes of energy vary spatially and temporally. So all of these atmospheric-centric goals are really important for us to understand and characterize the atmosphere. But we also have key goals and how the atmosphere interacts with the rest of the system. That is what mosaics is all about really, these interactions. So how does the atmosphere interact with everything else? So we talked about the energy fluxes and with sea ice, that's a really important interaction. Also the winds, right? We talked about how the winds lead to a transfer of energy into the movement of the sea ice there, they're blowing the sea ice around and making the sea ice crack, making it move, making it from ridges. Such a really important interaction between the atmosphere and the sea ice. There's this gas transfer we talked about, this really representing this interaction between what's happening chemically and biologically in the ocean and ice, and how that interacts with what's happening above in the atmosphere, and that gas transfer can affect things like the aerosol formation in the atmosphere. So it's another really important term. We're also interested in how, for example, atmospheric processes control sunlight. The sunlight is so important for the biological activity that's in the ocean and the sea ice. There's so many of these cross-cutting goals that we had that relate the atmosphere to the other parts of the arctic system. That's really what makes mosaic very exciting, and what makes the atmosphere part of the mosaic research an exciting part for me.
