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APPRAISE

Background

Understanding atmospheric aerosols is one of the most important ways we can improve models of likely climate change, particularly at regional scales.

APPRAISE will help us understand and quantify how aerosols:

  • affect the Earth's radiation budget, by scattering and/or absorbing radiation
  • influence clouds, and hence indirectly affect climate and the hydrological cycle
  • contribute to feedback processes between land, the biosphere and climate.

APPRAISE will develop climate models which better-represent these processes, making climate change predictions less uncertain.

APPRAISE will focus and co-ordinate NERC's investments in aerosol research. The programme will strengthen expertise in the UK, build links between existing excellent science activities, and provide a framework for UK scientists to collaborate with international colleagues. The NERC/Met Office BAe research aircraft and instrumentation, and links to existing modelling programmes, will help the programme put NERC's strategically-important aerosol research at the forefront of international research in this field.

Specifically, APPRAISE will:

  • use detailed field and laboratory measurements to improve knowledge on aerosol and cloud properties, processes and impacts.
  • use process models to improve parameterisations for global and regional climate and atmospheric transport models.
  • test and demonstrate how important aerosol and cloud processes are to climate, through a co-ordinated hierarchy of models that use atmospheric transport models to link aerosol processes to global climate models.
  • identify and quantify key couplings between aerosols in the biosphere and atmosphere at the process scale, so improving data for parameterisations.

The APPRAISE programme will seek to achieve these objectives through one round of targeted Consortia Grants (ie collaborative, multi-institutional proposals), covering three key areas, supported by a Core Programme of key strategic scientific activities.

Further information about this programme can be found by following the links below: