Under the umbrella of an ERC synergy grant, the AWACA project aims to better understand the atmospheric water cycle over Antarctica, combining observations and modeling to reconstruct the past climate and predict changes in future climate scenarios. The project is a collaboration of Valérie Masson-Delmotte (LSCE, CEA), Cristophe Genthon (LMD, CNRS), Thomas Dubos (LMD, École Polytechnique) and Alexis Berne (LTE, EPFL). The project includes a multi-year measurement campaign along a 1100 km transect spanning from the coast to the Antarctic plateau. Operating instruments throughout the Antarctic winter offers an unprecedented dataset of atmospheric measurements along typical moisture pathways.
LTE’s tasks in AWACA are related to the preparation and deployment of remote sensing instruments along the transect, then process and analyze the expected vast amount of data to characterize clouds and precipitation properties at the local and regional scales.
