Brief scientific background

Before we leave to the field station and you won't read anything new on this site for a few days , I briefly want to explain the motivation for such a project:

It is all about climate change and understanding climate, as well as understanding cloud formation and precipitation, and the connection between these.

A lot of research has been done in other places of the world, especially in the US and in Europe, but the large Amazonian rain forest is not yet sufficiently characterized when we speak about aerosol particles and cloud formation.

What are aerosol particles: Aerosol particles are tiny droplets or solid particles in the atmosphere, with diameters in the size range between roughly 10 nanometers (0.00000001 m) and 10 µm (0.00001 m). Why are they so important? Besides their health effect (in polluted areas) and their radiative effect (the so-called "direct aerosol effect" on climate), they are a prerequisite for cloud formation. Without aerosol particles, no cloud would form, because water vapor needs a very high supersaturation to condense in pure air. The condensation on a pre-existing aerosol particle is highly preferred. These aerosol particles are then called cloud condensation nuclei (CCN). A special subset are the ice-forming aerosol particles, the ice nuclei (IN). Ice in the Amazonian rain forest? Yes, if you go up in the atmosphere, temperature decreases, and in an altitude of about 4 km you reach 0°C, and higher above, the temperature can reach values of down -70°C in the tropics, at altitudes of about 16 km. Convective cumulus clouds can transport the air and the aerosol particles from ground level to high altitudes in a few hours, thereby causing the heavy thunderstorms associated with heavy rainfall.

The ability of an aerosol particle to act as a CCN or as IN depends on parameters like size and chemical composition. Our goal is to measure these properties here in the pristine rain forest, in order to understand the mechanisms of cloud formation over the rain forest, and possibly this allows other scientists to extrapolate these findings to higher temperatures that are expected when climate change continues (and it will).

Finally to the site!

In the past three days we have gone from being outraged, desperate, and almost ready to call it quits to a complete state of ecstasy. Two days ago (Tuesday) we were expecting our instruments to arrive early in the morning, supposedly already liberated from customs, but several hours went by and at 4 o’clock in the afternoon we were told there was a problem, that the instruments were being held for some reason. We went to the customs to see what was happening. We found out the brokers that were hired did not read the Brazilian law to import scientific instruments! Yes, believe it or not, we were missing an original document which the law very clearly asks for. Instead of asking us for this paper two months ago, they scanned the signature of one of the professors and pasted it into a copy of the document needed, of course the custom agent noticed the document was a copy and not the original. By this point it had been two weeks waiting for the instruments to clear customs, and since carnival starts next Monday, if our instruments were not out by this week we were certain we will not see them until Monday of the following week, ten more days of waiting! ... No way. Urgent mails were sent to the MPI asking for this document to be sent overnight, and frustration and anger took over Johannes, Marco, Miri and me. We were tired of being in Manaus waiting. That night we met Scot Martin to see what the hell we were going to do…we knew the document from the MPI was going to be sent here first thing german morning, but it was to risky being that there is no overnight for packages to Manaus, at least three days is the fastest anything can get into Manaus (hey, that’s even true for people, it took me three days to get here from Mexico City). It was decided Scot and Johannes were going to go and talk to the agent and try to convince her/him to release the instrument under the promise the document will be delivered as soon it got into Manaus. With any person this request seems reasonable or even obvious, but remember we are talking about custom agents not people! I myself decided I could not stay another day in Manaus, so I went to the site to spend the day there and see if I could help any one over there, I was too mad.

It could have not been a better decision. While I was releasing all of my anger walking through the jungle and going up a 60 meter tower, good things were happening at the customs: it seems the customs agent was in a good mood and told Johannes and Scot that if the MPI sent Johannes an email authorizing him to sign to make the document “official” and that as soon the real document got to Manaus they delivered to him, the instruments could be released. We could not believe it, a customs agent being reasonable and nice. We of course celebrated and indeed this morning at 8:30 the truck with our instruments arrived at INPA.

Tomorrow, February 1^st, we are leaving for the site; hence, I’ll be disconnected for the next week, minimum. I would like to stay at the site for two weeks straight, but we’ll see. Finally some measurements and the work we came here to do, I don’t think we’ve ever been so exited to go and work.

Day off...

One more weekend and we are still without our instruments, but we were told we had a very high probability of having our instruments on Monday or Tuesday, so we decided to enjoy the weekend and be full blown tourists. It turned out that the power generator at the research site broke, so practically all of the other scientist could not do any work and we decided to take a boat trip: 12 scientists taking a tour together!

Now, Southeast of Manus the Rio Negro River and the Rio Solimões come together and form the Amazonian river. The Rio Negro flows over a soil that makes the water black and acidic (has a Ph of about 4). Because of this, there are not a lot of fish nor mosquitoes. On the other hand, Rio Solimões flows over another type of soil and has a brownish color, a higher Ph, more fish and lots of mosquitoes. Due to these differences in physical properties it takes several kilometers for them to mix together, they flow next to each other sharply separated and very slowly they finally dissolve into each other. Our boat took us to see this “meeting of the waters”, very interesting to say the least.

Next stop: giant water lilies. There an alligator came out to say hi to all of us. After this stop it was about 12:30 and we all thought we were going to have lunch, but our guide decided to take us up stream the Rio Negro for more that 3 hours. In the boat there was only a little bit of fruit and no beer, by the time we arrived at the restaurant you can imagine everyone’s mood, thankfully the food came out fast and after 20 minutes our good mood came back and we were all ready to go piranha fishing! The 12 of us jumped in a canoe, went through small canals, and after 20/30 min we stopped next to the trees to begin…did we catch anything? Only Marco and Hartmut, but we all think it was the same piranha over and over, well only three times.

The bigger boat that brought us to there came to pick us up from our fishing canoe, and thankfully they allow us to jump off the boat and take a dip in the Rio Negro! Worried about the piranhas? Well, after an hour and a half of “fishing” and having caught the same piranha 3 times, we were like little kids jumping off and getting back on the boat to jump again, it was grrrrreat!

Finally, the trip back to Manaus: stomachs full, beer, and the sun setting over the river and the jungle, we could have not had been any better.

We had the perfect trip to relax and prepare our selves for the work that is about to begin.

soak up some brazilian culture!

So, since I am listed as an author here I think I should contribute to this blog, too.
First something on the current status of everything. Our instrument is still in customs BUT, and thats the good news, we were told it's pretty likely that it will be released today (Friday) which means it might be released Monday ;-) So we are quite confident to start setting up at the field site by the middle of next week.
Right now everybody is dealing with his daily buisness, as far its possible via internet and email, we got our police registration done, we still need to get this and that equipment, so we are keeping ourselves busy.
After having our first group meeting last night, we decided to follow the advice of the locals and head out for "pre-karneval" at a bar close to the hotel. Pre-karneval basically is a band contest to decide on which band will be allowed to play during the real karneval next week.
Since we were sent to a bar, we expected some decent party, but what we found was a whole street totally crowded with people. Mobile bars all over the place, and music probably loud enough to keep the whole block up all night long.

Since everyone needed to get up more or less early the next morning we just stayed a couple of beers or caipirinhas long, but it was definetly worth the experience and I guess we can all highly recommend karneval for those who will be here next week ;-)

Why haven't we started to work yet?

So, if you have read through Michel's blog up to now, you might wonder why we are not actually measuring something or at least are busy setting up our instrumentation.
The reason is: Customs. Although we accounted for some time that is required to get a whole load of expensive scientific instruments through the importation procedure (first shipments were sent in October 2007), we are still waiting for equipment to be released. But there's hope. During the last week or so, one shipment each day was released. There were a total of about 13 shipments (from the different participating research groups), and it seems we are on a good way. Optimistic estimate is that the Mainz equipment (of the Particle Chemistry Dept.) is released this week. This would be fine, since another (Harvard/Colorado) will install their Aerosol Mass Spectrometer at the field site over the weekend, and we can not work both inside the measurement container, that would be too narrow. So, if we can install Monday/Tuesday, we will be happy. In that case we can use the weekend to test our equipment here at INPA (the Amazonas Research Institute at Manaus), which has turned out to be a good idea.
Marco and me (Johannes) visited the field site yesterday, and our general impression was positive. I think it is a nice place to work (but we have to admit we had nice weather and no rain.
Nice weather means 26°C and 100% rel. humidity). But that's bearable! I had imagined it to be worse.
I climbed up to the top of the 60 m tower, and the view from up there was really impressive: Trees as far as you can see. A green ocean.
So, what are we doing in between: Well, this and that: Buying equipment that is missing (because we decided not to ship it but to buy it here), doing our usual work (via slow internet access), and sightseeing (we took a day off on Sunday). Teatro Amazonico is a must, but the street market was also very nice, and walking around in Manaus city was definitely interesting!

Where and how

I guess the first thing I have to clarify is our location.

Where is the research site?
Coordinates: We are approximately two and a half degrees south of the equator and 60 degrees west of the Greenwich meridian.
Closest city: The research site is roughly 50 km north of the city of Manaus.

Where are we staying?
Since the closest city from the research site is Manaus, practically all of the researches involved in the project are staying in the Saint Paul hotel downtown Manuas. When the instruments are released from customs then we will be staying at the research site in 5 day shifts. I guess if someone will like to stay longer, or needs to stay longer, probably he/she can stay, but at first, Scot Martin (one of the organizers of the campaign) wants people to stay a maximum of 5 days at the research site.

How do we get to the research site?
To get to the research site from Manuas first we have to drive north 50km on a regular 2 lane road, then at the 50km mark there is the entrance to a mud road. On this mud road we have to drive for about 35km.


However, the mud road is not easy to drive at all. We can only go to the research site with 4x4 trucks and experience drivers, a regular car won't be able to go more than 50 m.

Where are we going to sleep when we are at the research site?

There is a very big cabin being built for all of us to sleep in. Was it built only for the project, or has it been there for some time and they are rebuilding it? I have no idea.


View of cabin and eating area


Sleeping area

In the sleeping area you can choose to have a hammock as your bed instead of the bunk bed. As i mentioned before the interesting part is that there are no walls, everybody in one big room!

Intro

How do you get over 30 people to sleep in the middle of the amazonian jungle for more than a weekend without expecting to go fishing, site seeing, or go back to a comfortable hotel bed at night? Actually, all these people are there to work, are happy and most of them honored. If you ask me, I'll tell you only crazy people will do that, or maybe scientist. Of course it sounds cool when someone hears "I'm going to Brazil, to the middle of the amazons", but have you stop to think what does that imply? ...don't even start, it is not worth it. What's worth it is being here and being part of all these crazy people trying to understand a little bit more of the behavior of the newest biggest star of our planet: the atmosphere.

After the media began to put attention on the changes that are taking place in our atmosphere, children, adults and our grandparents actually started to be aware of their surroundings (I guess is the only thing "good" the TV and the newspapers have done, and I'm not talking about the way they published the news about the atmosphere), they began to look up to the sky, to observe the clouds, feel the temperature on their skin, realized that it was not suppose to rain on that time of the year, or that the wind had never blown as strong as it did the day before. Fortunately, the awareness did not stop there, people started to ask for less plastic bags in the supermarket and how much gasoline their cars consume per kilometer, to mention a couple of changes, but I'm not going to expand on the awareness increase of the world population cause by the global warming phenomenon (that's another entry on its own). What I do hope this blog will expand on, with good narration and explanations for my none scientist friends, is in the understanding of what is it that we are measuring and how a measuring campaign takes place with some of the best atmospheric scientist (and those of us who are learning from them)in the world arrange in it.
I'm also very interested in seeing how 30 to 40 scientist, who we know are not the best social animals, get along in a cabin where they have to sleep in bunk beds or hammocks with no walls that separate the beds, and one, or at the most two, showers. I think that is going to be the most interesting part of the campaign or at least the one where I'll get to laugh the most.
I hope everybody will learn a little from reading this, or at least get a good laugh out of it.