8 July 2014, by Matt Shupe:
Clouds, clouds, clouds. I came here to study them, and indeed they are here. It has been gray and overcast for the last 3 days. At times drizzly. At times foggy. Many versions of cloudiness, but still cloudy. As far as one can see in every direction there’s a whitish gray above (clouds) and a dark gray below (the ocean). Not much color to be found. I now have some cloud in a bottle. Captured using an aspirated inlet that I’m running for a colleague from Stockholm University. One of the interesting and important questions about Arctic clouds is the identity of the particles that cloud droplets form upon. Cloud condensation nuclei. Each cloud drop needs one, and we don’t necessarily know their origin in the Central Arctic, especially over the ice pack. Do they simply advect into the region with the winds? Or is there a local source of these particles coming from the leads in the ice? We won’t answer that question here, but our observations will hopefully shed some light on this otherwise cloudy subject.
