Clarkson University Researchers Develop High-Altitude Particle Sampling Device that Could Help Scientists Learn to Cool Earth
A new aerosol sampler, designed by Clarkson University researchers, has the potential to help scientists understand how particles in the stratosphere could help cool the planet.
The device, developed by Bayard D. Clarkson Distinguished Professor of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering Suresh Dhaniyala and graduate student Nagarajan Radhakrishnan, is mounted on the NASA WB-57, a high altitude research aircraft capable of flying at altitudes over 60,000 feet.
The device was developed in collaboration with National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) Chemical Science Laboratory with funding from the Climate Program Office’s Earth’s Radiation Budget (ERB) program, and was recently flown as part of the SABRE campaign. The goal of the device is to more accurately sample particles present in the stratosphere.
The Clarkson team collaborated with NOAA Research Physicist Charles A. Brock and researchers from the Keutsch group at Harvard University during these flight tests.
Dhaniyala explained that understanding particles in the stratosphere is vital to climate research. Many of these particles reflect sunlight, which can mean less heat is getting through to Earth’s surface.
“Any changes made to the stratosphere can have a big climate impact. If you put particles in there, intentionally or otherwise, that can have a dramatic cooling effect globally,” he said. “Big volcanic eruptions can result in a large number of particles in the stratosphere. That can cool the Earth for nearly a year or two.”
Stratospheric particles could be in a wide range of sizes. The sampling device developed at Clarkson allows sampling with minimal turbulence, enabling accurate sampling of all particles, particularly the largest ones.
“You are flying at 500 miles per hour, and you want to know what is outside,” Dhaniyala explained. “If you are driving down the road at 50 miles per hour and there are small insects, they are just splattering on your windshield. When you are going at 500 miles per hour, the large stratospheric particles are like insects.”
These larger particles are particularly important, Dhaniyala said, because they reflect significantly more light than smaller particles. While most particles in the stratosphere are roughly 100 nanometers in size, which is roughly 1,000 times smaller than the width of a human hair, a particle 10 times its size can reflect more than 100 to 1000 times as much light.
The device developed at Clarkson helps more accurately sample these larger particles that have an outsized capability of reflecting light.
“It could well be that the bigger particles are a little more important, maybe a lot more important,” Dhaniyala said. “So we want to sample them very accurately. These particles are the most impacted by inertia and are also likely to be most impacted by turbulence. And since these particles are so few in number, when we lose even a small fraction, then the impact on scientific conclusions could be very large.”
Clarkson’s research team successfully completed its flight testing at NASA last month and was featured in NOAA’s Hot News item last month.
