CRiceS Postdoc Felix Pithan was awarded an European Research Council (ERC) starting grant. It is designed for “talented early-career scientists who have already produced excellent supervised work, are ready to work independently and show potential to be research leaders”.

Can you describe your work in the CRiceS project?

Felix:  I evaluate how climate models represent the properties of air masses exchanged between the Arctic and lower latitudes, and the processes that control the exchange of heat between the Arctic atmosphere and surface.

I have been using observations from the year-long Arctic drift campaign MOSAiC and from the AWIPEV research base in Svalbard. One result is that models that attempt to track the number of ice crystals per volume of air in a cloud at each moment in time do better at representing moisture in the Arctic winter atmosphere than other models, which assume the number of ice crystals is just a function of temperature.

Congratulations on the ERC starting grant! What is the project you have been awarded for? 

The topic of my project is "Understanding Arctic amplification through air-mass transformations". I aim to understand how the exchange of air masses between the Arctic and lower latitudes and the thermodynamic transformation of these air masses couple the Arctic to the global climate system, and how this coupling affects and changes in a changing climate.

Why is the understanding of air mass transformations important?

The approach we are taking in both modelling and observational work, i.e. to follow the evolution of individual air masses, will allow us to tie our understanding of small-scale processes in clouds and the boundary layer, i.e. the lowest kilometer of the atmosphere, to a holistic view of climate change and the Arctic climate system.

This has not been possible using the established frameworks and will yield a much better understanding of the changes the Arctic is already experiencing and will experience in the coming decades.