| Summary: | Our limited understanding of clouds is a major source of uncertainty in climate sensitivity and climate model projections. The Southern Ocean is the largest region on Earth where climate models present large biases in short and long wave radiation fluxes which in turn affect the representation of sea surface temperatures, sea ice and ultimately large-scale circulation in the Southern Hemisphere. Evidence suggests that the poor representation of mixed phase clouds at the micro- and macro scales is responsible for the model biases in this region. The Southern Ocean Clouds (SOC) project is a multi-scale, multi-platform approach with the aim of improving understanding of aerosol and cloud microphysics in this region, and their representation in numerical models. Since early 2022 observations of aerosol properties have been taken at a clean air site close to Rothera research station on the Antarctic Peninsula. These include measurements of aerosol size, their composition and whether they will act as cloud forming nuclei. The year-round observations have been supplemented by airborne measurements of cloud properties, which can be compared to ground-based observations thus directly contrasting the detailed ground-based aerosol observations with clouds properties down wind of the site. Here we present the first results from this project. The data suggests a link between DMS production, new particle formation and sulphate aerosols and this can be tentatively linked to the cloud properties.
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