ISLAS2022 field campaign
The field campaign ISLAS2022 (21 March to 10 April 2022) focussed on the entire water cycle with Lagrangian sampling flights between Svalbard and the coast of Northern Norway.
The origin and fate of Arctic water vapour
Main content
The ISLAS2022 aircraft campaign is the central objective of the ERC-funded project ISLAS. The main scientific aim is to collect a dataset within the natural laboratory of the Nordic seas that allows to observe isotope fractionation during a single complete local water cycle within a cold-air outbreak. The most significant piece of equipment is an instrument to measure the stable isotope composition of water vapour in-situ from the aircraft. However, it only obtains its full value by an array of complementary measurements, including research vessel, precipitation sampling, and measurements at several supersites.
During Lagrangian flight experiments in the ISLAS2022 campaign, we aim to observe the聽evolution of the isotope composition of the airmass as it undergoes mixing and fractionation聽processes (Science aim 1, Table 1). Observation of this local water cycle in addition requires the聽initial and boundary conditions for this process. This will be obtained from probing the isotope聽composition of the evaporation flux over open ocean, off聽the sea ice edge (Science aim 2), the聽isotope composition of free-troposphere air above the growing boundary layer (Science aim 3),聽and the isotope composition of cloud water and precipitation during condensation processes聽(Science aim 4). In combination, this will enable the assessment of how well second-order聽parameters of the stable isotope composition are during this entire local water cycle (Science aim聽5). Achieving this aim for the challenging parameter聽17O-excess will require a means to obtain聽liquid water samples with a volume >0.1 ml. Since aircraft measurements of the stable isotope聽composition have never been performed in this region, the spatial representativeness of聽measurement signals at different elevations and throughout time, in particular in relation to the聽network of stations being installed in the Arctic, will be very valuable (Science aim 6). During聽situations of warm-air intrusions into the Arctic, it will be valuable to perform Lagrangian flight聽experiments and to assess the isotope signature of water vapour with extratropical and聽subtropical origin at different elevations (Science aim 7). We will use the opportunity to collect聽Setup of ISLAS aircraft campaign 2022聽measurements that can be used for verification of satellite-borne remote-sensing of聽未D. Figure 1聽summarises the inter-relation of the different measurement activities planned during ISLAS 2022.
During the field campaign, we also asked citizens to contribute to our field sampling by collecting surface snow. Read here about the results from the citizen science activity during ISLAS2022.
