SEARCH Arctic Cloud and Aerosol Observatory Deployed

August 8, 2005
Contact: Taneil Uttal

The first NOAA SEARCH observatory designed to make long-term climate measurements of Arctic clouds and aerosols has been established by NOAA's Environmental Technology Laboratory (ETL) in collaboration with the University of Wisconsin and the Canadian CANDAC program.

As part of the NOAA Study of Environmental Arctic Change (SEARCH) program, the observatory was deployed to improve atmospheric and sea ice observations. These observations will be combined with historical data to better understand Arctic change.

The installation of equipment began in late July. This week a sophisticated radar and lidar will be operating continuously, monitoring properties of clouds and aerosols from the surface to 12 km altitude. More information about the installation and data are available at:

• Eureka Deployment website,
• the University of Wisconsin Lidar Group website and
• the NOAA Portable Cloud Observatory (NPCO) webpage.

Many indicators suggest that the impacts of climate change will be observed most rapidly in the Arctic. This is a critical region of the global atmospheric and ocean system where changes in deep ocean circulations, the distribution and thickness of frozen Arctic Ocean ice, the extent of the Greenland ice, and terrestrial carbon dioxide storage could have far reaching impacts for our environment.

While there is a history of basic measurements in the Arctic that are measuring "HOW" the Arctic climate may be changing, there are almost no monitoring programs that provide information to determine "WHY" the Arctic climate is changing. Consequently, NOAA has teamed with Canadian and U.S. university researchers to deploy a comprehensive suite of atmospheric sensors in Eureka, Canada, at 80° N/ 86° W. This site will collect detailed measurements of clouds radiation, aerosols, surface fluxes and chemistry in the lower atmosphere as well as key measurements in the middle and upper atmosphere that will be sufficient to determine the processes driving climate change.

These initial images are the first of many as a complete complement of additional lidars, radiometers, in-situ sensors, optical instruments, and wind profilers are installed at the Eureka site over the next year through the combined efforts of the NOAA SEARCH program, the Canadian CANDAC program, Meteorological Services Canada and a number of U.S. university researchers.

More Information

• Study of Environmental Arctic Change (SEARCH) website