Atmospheric Science
The issue: what’s at stake?
Clouds play a crucial role in regulating Earth’s climate. Their properties – particularly the balance between liquid water and ice – are shaped by aerosol particles, including ice-nucleating particles (INPs). These tiny particles trigger the freezing of supercooled water droplets, forming ice crystals that influence cloud structure, longevity, and rainfall patterns.
Despite their importance, INPs remain one of the least understood factors in climate models. Bioaerosols, dust, and other airborne particles can act as INPs, affecting how clouds form and evolve. For example, dust emissions from Iceland are thought to play a significant but poorly quantified role in shaping cloud properties over the North Atlantic, a region that is considered critical for global climate regulation. The extent to which these airborne particles influence cloud radiative properties – determining how much sunlight is reflected or absorbed – has direct implications for Arctic warming and broader climate change.
The need for technological breakthroughs
Real-time, high-resolution bioaerosol measurements remain limited. Without automated detection systems, we lack critical data on how bioaerosols interact with clouds and climate processes. To reduce uncertainties in climate predictions, we must develop better technologies to detect, classify, and monitor bioaerosols at high altitudes and across diverse environments, from urban centres to remote oceanic regions.
There is a need for automated, portable instrumentation that can reliably measure INP concentrations across the full range of tropospheric temperatures. We also need to find alternatives to using costly traditional research aircraft for routine high-altitude monitoring, exploring the use of scalable and cost-effective drone technology and on-board miniaturised aerosol capture systems.
Why the Biodetection Technologies Hub?
Based at Cranfield University, the FAAM Airborne Laboratory is a specially adapted research aircraft that tackles some of the most difficult problems in atmospheric science. It is undergoing a £49m ‘Mid-Life Upgrade’ and University of Manchester and Leeds researchers are part of NERC-funded programmes to equip the craft with new instrumentation, including bioaerosol detection systems, and carry out field research using new monitoring technologies. This includes instrumentation developed at University of Hertfordshire that is helping to characterise and map the distribution of bioaerosols, from the Antarctic Ocean to the North Atlantic Ocean.
University of Leeds researchers are also investigating the deployment of drones, equipped with advanced miniaturised instrumentation developed at University of Hertfordshire, for high-altitude particle sampling – as a cost-effective, scalable alternative to manned aircraft.
How do we get there?
Hub researchers are building on existing collaborations with British Antarctic Survey, using the Royal Research Ship Sir David Attenborough, to study the ice-nucleating activity of Antarctic dusts, soils, mosses and lichen. They are deploying cutting-edge airborne particle capture and detection technologies to understand how this activity is affecting cloud formation in the Southern Ocean.
On the other side of the world, in Iceland, Hub researchers are expanding the use of University of Hertfordshire’s miniaturised sensor technologies to better understand how dust emissions are influencing cloud radiative properties. The integration of these technologies into drone-based systems allows continuous vertical profiling and particle collection, improving the availability of data for climate modelling.
