Center for Atmospheric Science contribution to FGAM
Introduction to FGAM
The Facility for Ground based Atmospheric Measurements (FGAM) is a NERC NCAS facility providing UK leadership in atmospheric science research and PhD knowledge exchange. It provides the most advanced state of the art instrumentation for aerosol composition and cloud microphysics research available in the UK. It also has facilities to support research into small scale and meso-scale atmospheric phenomenon. The facility is part of a wider consortium of universities. Manchester is the UK NCAS centre for excellence in atmospheric aerosol-cloud interaction observations and modelling. NCAS Manchester plays a significant role in UK airborne atmospheric observational capability by providing a range of aerosol mass spectrometric, cloud spectrometer and organic, acid and greenhouse gas measurements for the large UK research aircraft at FAAM. NCAS Manchester also operate the NERC MST radar facility at Aberystwyth. These instruments are supported by three NCAS instrument scientists and two NCAS fellows who also provide PhD students with training. NCAS
Manchester also operate ground and ship borne based instrumented sea containers.
Since January 2005, the Aberystwyth component of FGAM moved to The University of Manchester, with Professor Geraint Vaughan, the current NCAS Director of Weather based here.The Aberystwyth facility has instrumentation to study meteorology and dynamics and leads many integrated remote sensing and airborne projects to study storm initiation and evolution to improve numerical weather models in collaboration with NCAS and the UK Meteorological Office.
Facilities hosted by the Centre for Atmospheric Science
The University of Manchester Centre for Atmospheric Science hosts in-situe and remote sensing instrumentation for the study of clouds, aerosols, radiation and dynamics. This includes several instruments for use on the FAAM BAE146 aircraft. We also host infrastructure to support these instruments such as mobile laboratory facilities etc. There are four FGAM instrument scientists at The University of Manchester they are Dr. James Dorsey (cloud microphysics instrumentation), Dr. Paul Williams (aerosol instrumentation), Dr. Emily Norton (remote sensing instrumentation) and Dr. Hugo Ricketts (remote sensing instrumentation). The instrument scientists are responsible for the operation and maintenance of the FGAM instruments, and provide support for them during field deployments, as well as analyzing data and contributing to publications. They are also involved with continual development and improvement of the instruments and facilities available, and developing improved methods of data analysis.
The instruments and facilities hosted at the centre are listed here, and publications resulting from projects using FGAM equipment can be found here. Almost all our FGAM facilities have been used extensively, often on several major projects each year, with some in use almost continuously. A few major projects which have made extensive use of FGAM equipment are described in more detail on our project pages. These include ACTIVE, CLACE4, CSIP and RHaMBLe.