Development and Applications of the Portable Ice Nucleation Experiment PINE for Monitoring Ice-Nucleating Particles across the Globe

Instituto Tecnológico de Karlsruhe

Ice-nucleating particles (INPs) are a very minor, but strongly temperature-dependent subset of atmospheric aerosol particles. They are key to initiate primary ice formation in clouds, and thereby also strongly influence the formation of precipitation as well as the life cycles of clouds and their climatically relevant optical properties. We have developed the new instrument PINE (Portable Ice Nucleation Experiment) for automated and long-term measurements of INPs at field observatories or onboard research aircrafts. It is the first instrument for automatically measuring INPs at high time resolution of up to 5 minutes and in a wide temperature range from about -10 °C to -65 °C. After briefly explaining the working principle of PINE, example results from various locations around the world will be presented and compared to aerosol-dependent parameterizations and results from models predicting INP concentrations.