Southern Ocean Clouds

Clouds over the Southern Ocean are badly represented in climate models, and this project will send aircraft, ships, and Antarctic land stations to find out why. The problem matters because the Southern Ocean is a major driver of global climate, yet climate models consistently get its temperature and energy balance wrong. The leading suspect is poor representation of clouds—both their microscopic droplet physics and their large-scale behaviour. Without knowing which aerosols seed these clouds and where they come from, models cannot simulate how the region reflects sunlight or traps heat. If this research succeeds, it will feed directly into the next generation of climate models. Better cloud representation in the Southern Ocean should reduce the large uncertainties in climate sensitivity—how much the planet warms for a given rise in CO₂. That, in turn, would improve projections of sea-level rise, storm tracks, and rainfall patterns for the UK and beyond. This is fundamental atmospheric science with a clear practical endpoint: more reliable climate projections. The observations will identify the composition and sources of cloud-forming aerosols, giving modellers the data they need to fix a persistent blind spot in the Earth system.