Collaborative Research: NERC-NSFGEO--Constraining Longwave Energy Flows in Cold Climates (CLEFCC)

About This Grant

This is a project jointly funded by the National Science Foundation’s Directorate for Geosciences (NSF/GEO) and the National Environment Research Council (NERC) of the United Kingdom (UK) via the NSF/GEO-NERC Lead Agency Agreement. This Agreement allows a single joint US/UK proposal to be submitted and peer-reviewed by the Agency whose investigator has the largest proportion of the budget. Upon successful joint determination of an award recommendation, each Agency funds the proportion of the budget that supports scientists at institutions in their respective countries. Earth’s energy budget is balanced between incoming solar radiation and outgoing thermal energy. Clouds exert a significant impact in both directions, but there has been significantly more study of the impact of clouds on incoming energy from the sun. This project will focus on the opposite route, the emission of longwave, or infrared, radiation from the Earth’s surface and how that radiation interacts with ice clouds in the high latitudes. The impact of this study will be to provide better information to the scientific community on processes that are important for understanding the warming Arctic region. The project will also enhance collaboration between US and UK scientists and provide training for early career researchers. This project addresses three primary research questions: (1) Do current representations of surface properties capture the longwave emission spectrum of snow and ice surfaces correctly? (2) Is a new light-scattering model able to reconcile ice cloud microphysics (ice crystal sizes, shapes) with energetic (radiative) impact across the longwave spectrum? (3) Can our radiative transfer models successfully match simultaneous observations of the longwave energy spectrum at the surface, within the atmosphere and at the top of the atmosphere under a variety of different atmospheric and surface conditions? The research team will address these questions through a multi-faceted plan. First, the team will use measurements from a new instrument, called the Far-INfrarEd Spectrometer for Surface Emissivity (FINESSE) that has been deployed in Norway and Canada in the past few years. The deployment in Canada was matched with airborne observations of clouds, providing both radiative and cloud properties to the research team. This data will be used to evaluate a new ice cloud optical property model, assess the impact of snow and ice emissivity models in an Earth System Model, and combine the ground and airborne data with satellite observations to achieve radiative closure from the surface to space across the infrared spectrum for the first time. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.