The Asian Monsoon System is one of the Earth’s largest and most energetic weather systems, and monsoon rainfall is critical to feeding over a billion people in Asia. CNR-INO is part of an international team of scientists led by the Alfred Wegener Institute, Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research (AWI), which is now conducting the first-ever scientific mission to the upper levels of the monsoon system, using a high-altitude research aircraft flying out of Nepal. The results will help to better understand how this important weather system affects global climate and how it may change in the future.
During summer, the Asian Monsoon is not only important for Asia but affects weather patterns over the entire northern hemisphere. The Monsoon also acts like an enormous elevator, pumping vast amounts of air and pollutants from the surface up to levels above 16 km altitude. These altitudes are so high that monsoon air then ascends freely into the stratosphere, the stable layer that overlies the lower part of the atmosphere and contains the Earth’s protective ozone layer. Once in the stratosphere, monsoon air spreads globally and persists for years. Satellite images show a large cloud of aerosols – small droplets or dust particles – directly above the monsoon and extending from the Arabian Peninsula to the eastern coast of China.
The formation and properties of the aerosol cloud that sits above the monsoon are a major unknown in climate science, and their potential future changes represent one of the largest uncertainties in climate predictions. Aerosols may either warm or cool the Earth’s surface, depending on their composition and how they interact with cloud formation processes. We also do not understand how monsoon rainfall will respond to changes in emissions of pollutants or to climate change.
Project leader Markus Rex from AWI explains: “For the first time we will be able to study the composition of the air that reaches the tropopause region and the stratosphere above the monsoon and affects their composition globally”. The StratoClim observations will provide the first close-up view of the upper reaches of the monsoon, as no prior research flights have ever sampled this critical part of the Earth’s atmosphere. The measurement campaign consists of a series of nine research flights in this region, started on july 26, and extending to mid-August 2017. High-altitude airplane flights will be complemented by launches of research balloons from ground stations in Nepal, Bangladesh, China, India and Palau.
The research project StratoClim (Stratospheric and upper tropospheric processes for better climate predictions) is funded by the European Union. Its goal is to better understand key climate processes in the upper troposphere and in the stratosphere to enable more reliable climate predictions.
CNR-INO contributes to the measurements with a gas analyzer, based on spectroscopic techniques, which measures carbon monoxide (CO) and nitrogen dioxide (N2O). This device has a resolution of about one part per billion in concentration, is specifically designed to face the mechanical, thermal and pressure stresses of stratospheric flights.
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