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APPRAISE

Core Objectives

To achieve its overall objectives, add value to the consortia activities and provide a strategic vision for aerosols research, APPRAISE will seek to fund several key scientific areas that provide underpinning science to the programme. The activities have been targeted such that they will facilitate and assist more than one of the consortia. Details of the rationale and targets of each of these areas can be found in Appendix 2 of the Science Plan (see Resources).

The key objectives of the elements of the core programme are outlined below:

Formation Pathways and Properties of Organic Aerosols

Main deliverables:

  • An improved description of secondary organic aerosol production
  • A framework for assessing its role in the behaviour of mixed component aerosol

Improved Representation and Validation of the Radiative Properties and Impacts of Aerosols and Clouds
Main deliverables:

  • A community radiative transfer model that can be both simplified or made more complex and so be incorporated into a wide range of aerosol models, and an assessment of the quality of the required inputs.
  • Provision of aerosol optical depth, size distribution and refractive index such as is already available from the development/enhancement of existing sunphotometer measurements in the UK.
  • A database of aerosol products including aerosol optical depth, aerosol Angstrom coefficients, aerosol size distributions, and single scattering albedo, and similar products for specific FAAM aircraft operations/dedicated aerosol measurement campaigns.

Development of a Global Model to Investigate Key Aerosol and Cloud Processes

Main deliverables:

  • A global aerosol model that is capable of (i) carrying the main aerosol types, (ii) deal with complex mixing states and (iii) act as a key stage in the hierarchical testing of aerosol processes in APPRAISE.
  • Coordination of the development of the hierarchical model development, interfacing with other modelling effort in the UK.

Improved Coupling of In Situ Cloud Measurements with Novel Model Schemes

Main deliverables:

  • Improved treatment of cloud/aerosol interactions in cloud resolving models including explicit aerosol and cloud microphysics that is based on an improved knowledge of the interaction of clouds and aerosol especially mixed phase clouds