The American Geophysical Union fall meeting will take place in San Francisco, CA from the 14-18th December 2009. This meeting will gather around 16 000 geophysicists around topics covering all areas of Earth and Space sciences.

Come to meet us booth 428. 

The VOCALS-UK project led by Professor Hugh Coe from the University of Manchester and Dr Phil Brown from the UK Met Office aims to investigate how the vast cloud systems off the coast of Chile and Peru affect the Earth's climate . The clouds are marine stratocumulus which usually occur near land where deep, cold, upwelling water reaches the surface of the sea. This water cools the surface air, resulting in condensation and cloud formation. The clouds do not exceed 2km in altitude, and they are present nearly all year round in the South-East Pacific region and cover an area of ocean often larger than the USA. Marine stratocumulus are important to the climate because they reflect sunlight back into space cooling the ocean below. However current representation of these systems in global climate models is poor.  The VOCALS project has measured the properties of these clouds, using EZ Lidar™ mounted on board of an ARSF Dornier 228 airborne (source: www.cas.manchester.ac.uk).