Science & Technology

The key-mission of CIS is to offer operational support to ACTRIS National Facilities (NFs) operating instrumentation for continuous long-term measurements of cloud occurrence, cloud water content, and cloud droplet effective diameter at observational platforms, or for episodic measurements of cloud particle size distributions, chemical cloud water composition, and ice nucleating particles during dedicated laboratory and field campaigns.

Observational Platforms

Observational platforms have to provide the two mandatory variables

• liquid water content
• droplet effective diameter

and must provide at least two of the specializing variables

• droplet number concentration
• droplet size distribution
• ice particle number concentration
• ice particle size distribution
• INP number concentration
• INP temperature spectrum
• bulk cloud water chemical composition

Mandatory Variables

PVM-100

© GeoSphere Austria, SBO /Elke Ludewig

Particulate Volume Monitor PVM-100 from Gerber Scientic Inc.

• liquid water content
• droplet effective diameter

INP measurements 

HINC-Auto	PINE	INSKET
© ETH Zurich/Cyrill Brunner Continuous Flow Diffusion Chamber HINC (Horizontal Ice Nucleation Chamber)-Auto developed by ETH Zurich See also technical paper	© Bilfinger Noell GmbH Mobile cloud chamber PINE developed by KIT See also technical paper and availability at Bilfinger Noell GmbH.	© KIT/IMK-AAF Freezing Assay INSEKT (Ice Nucleation Spectrometer of the Karlsruhe Insitute of Technology) See also technical paper

Cloud water chemistry

The cloud water chemistry analysis contains both the cloud water sampling with specialized collectors and the subsequent offline chemical analysis by i.e. ion chromatography systems.

Cloud particle measurements

Supported instruments for cloud particle measurements are based on Mie-Scattering Probes as CDP and Imaging Probes as CPI.