Coordination:

In order to make POLARCAT a success, the international activities must be coordinated. NILU has a long history of leading large international projects and the lead scientist of this proposal is familiar with the challenges of such a large international activity. He has coordinated aircraft activities for the so-called Lagrangian experiment in the framework of ICARTT (International Consortium for Atmospheric Research on Transport and Transformation) in summer 2004 and has worked with many POLARCAT partners in the past.

POLARCAT coordination will include

• setting up an international project secretariate;
• reporting to and keeping contact with the endorsing organizations, the IPY IPO, and the media;
• e-mail contact with POLARCAT scientists (now 140 but more during IPY);
• organizing bi-annual meetings of the POLARCAT steering committee, and annual science meetings for the entire POLARCAT community
• keeping contact with other IPY projects (coordinator is directly involved in 5 other projects);
• hosting all POLARCAT-relevant information on a webpage kept actual on a monthly basis. A “Field operations” website will be created that links together all available resources (e.g., forecast products, satellite imagery, data sets, etc.);
• setting up a meta-database with links to the data archives of participating organizations;
• provision of forecasts and analyses of pollution transport for all POLARCAT platforms;
• organizing special issues in major scientific journals for publication of POLARCAT results.

Transport model forecasts:

Forecasts of pollution transport with the Lagrangian particle dispersion model FLEXPART have been provided for several major campaigns in the past (e.g., Stohl et al., 2003; Forster et al., 2004; Stohl et al., 2004; Methven et al., 2006) and are popular for flight planning, scheduling lidar measurements, etc. At the time of this writing, for instance, FLEXPART forecasts are being used in a major field mission exploring pollution export from Mexico City. During POLARCAT field missions, NILU will provide forecasts four times a day. Several improvements to the current system will be made, especially a better real-time ingestion of biomass burning emission information.

Transport model analyses:

The Lagrangian particle dispersion model FLEXPART will be run backward in time for 20 days from all POLARCAT stations and mobile platforms. For surface stations, these calculations will be made every 3 hours for a ten-year period; for mobile platforms, 5 they will be made for small segments along a platform’s trajectory. Results will be made available on the internet and shall replace trajectory calculations as the primary resource for interpreting transport processes. Since the ICARTT campaign in summer 2004, these products  have already been used in 15 publications. Providing transport model forecasts and analyses for all POLARCAT platforms will ensure a very high standard for both the flight planning and for the interpretation of the influence of transport processes on the measured data. From past experience, it is expected that several POLARCAT key players (e.g., AWI, DLR, CNRS, NOAA) will heavily use these products. Furthermore, through provision of these products, NILU will become involved in many different scientific studies during IPY whose full scope is currently impossible to know.