The CloudRoots project asks a simple but powerful question: How does the Amazon rainforest interact with its own clouds? CloudRoots explores this two-way dialogue between forest and atmosphere across scales ranging from tiny leaf pores to clouds several kilometers above the Amazon. The team published the results from their research in several papers.
In a new study, Marco A. Franco and his colleagues analyzed when and under what conditions aerosols grow to a size relevant for cloud formation. Such growth events are relatively rare in the Amazon rainforest and follow and pronounced diurnal and seasonal cycles. The majority take place during the daytime, and during the wet season. But the team also discovered a few remarkable exceptions.
It is long known that aerosols, directly and indirectly, affect clouds and precipitation. But very few studies have focused on the opposite: the question of how clouds modify aerosol properties. Therefore, Luiz Machado and his colleagues looked into this process at ATTO. Specifically, they studied how weather events influenced the size distribution of aerosol particles.
Bioaerosols may act as cloud condensation nuclei and ice nuclei, thereby influencing the formation of clouds and precipitation. But so far there is less knowledge about the ice nucleation activity of each bioaerosol group and atmospheric models hitherto have not differentiated between them. Patade et al. created a new empirical parameterization for five groups of bioaerosols, based on analysis of the characteristics of bioaerosols at ATTO: fungal spores, bacteria, pollen, plant/animal/viral detritus, and algae. This makes it possible for any cloud model to access the role of an individual group of bioaerosols in altering cloud properties and precipitation formation.
The majority of global precipitation is formed through the pathway of ice nucleation, but we’re facing large knowledge gaps that include the distribution, seasonal variations and sources of ice-nucleating particles. To fill some of those knowledge gaps, Jann Schrod and his co-authors produced a record of long-term measurements of INPs. They collected data for nearly two years at four different locations. One of those sites was ATTO.
