Flight to Antarctica rescheduled.. Atmospheric river forecasted..

Our project APMAR2 - Antarctic Peninsula precipitation and surface Mass and energy balance: what is the role of Atmospheric Rivers?  has started with the first leg – arriving to southern Chile, Punta Arenas, the gateway to Antarctica. 


Photo: Night clouds over Strait of Magellan and Punta Arenas. 29 January 2023. ©Irina Gorodetskaya

The project is funded by PROPOLAR - Portuguese Polar Program with support by KOPRI – Korea Polar Research Institute and INACH – Chilean Antarctic Institute. APMAR2 team is Irina Gorodetskaya (researcher at CIIMAR and project PI), Claudio Durán-Alarcón (researcher at CESAM/University of Aveiro), and Sang-Jong Park (researcher at KOPRI). We are all heading to the Korean King Sejong station on King George Island, northern Antarctic Peninsula. 

APMAR2 project is a continuation of the last year projects APMAR and TULIP (oh yes.. Antarctic Tulips do exist:), about which you can read in this blog. 

We will install MRR-Pro radar to measure snowfall and rainfall, will be launching radiosondes to measure the vertical structure of the first 20 km of the atmosphere and will collect precipitation samples to analyze their composition. The MRR-Pro radar measurements are collaboration with Vincent Favier, Researcher at IGE - Institut des Géosciences de l'Environnement, Grenoble, France, and project ANR-ARCA. Together with the radiosonde observations, we will launch special sensors measuring the amount of the supercooled liquid water in clouds - in collaboration with Penny Rowe (NorthWest Research Associates) and her NSF project "Cloud Radiative Impact on the Surface Energy Budget of the Antarctic Peninsula". 

And our main goal is to measure and better understand what is happening during atmospheric rivers or “rivers in the sky”,which are long corridors of moisture (and heat!) arriving all the way from sub-tropics to Antarctica. They bring extreme warm weather  to the Antarctic Peninsula and can weaken its ice shelves..

Now waiting for the flight to King George Island.. We hope to arrive and start our measurements before the next atmospheric river, which is forecasted to hit southern tip of South America and then Antarctic Peninsula on 8 February.. 

Stay tuned!

Graph: Atmospheric river stretching from subtropical Pacific Ocean to southern South America and continuing over the Drake Passage to the Antarctic Peninsula. Image source: https://www.atmos.albany.edu/student/abentley/realtime/







Comments

  1. JoriFebruary 4, 2023 at 2:48 AM

    Hello Irina, have I nice research! (José, your neighbour in Tânger street 😀)

    ReplyDelete

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