At 120 feet long and 18 feet tall, it can hold up to 36,000 gallons of water and generate near hurricane-force winds at sub-zero temperatures.
Researchers hope the first-of-its kind machine will help solve, among other things, one of science’s most pressing questions: Will clouds help slow or speed up global warming?
Kimberly Prather, an atmospheric chemist at Scripps, called it the “largest single uncertainty in all of climate change.”
“There’s not a model right now that can actually predict where and when clouds form,” said Prather, the director of the Center for Aerosol Impacts on Chemistry of the Environment at Scripps.
Scientists believe that clouds, which reflect sunlight, currently have an overall cooling effect on the planet. However, they can also trap heat, especially wispy, high-flying formations.
That means, depending on how clouds react to rising accumulations of greenhouse gas, Earth may have a built-in buffer against climate change — or be headed for runaway warming.
Specifically, Prather and other researchers plan to use UCSD’s new facility to study the conditions that form clouds over the ocean. These white puffs of moisture take shape when droplets cling to tiny marine aerosols, such as phytoplankton, sea salts, even viruses and bacteria.
Until now, researchers have largely studied these interactions at sea, where conditions are hard if not impossible to control. With the help of the simulator, Prather said, the world could be headed for a profound scientific breakthrough.
“People are talking about using the ocean potentially for geoengineering, making more clouds to keep the Earth cooler,” she said, “but nobody understands quite what comes out of the ocean.”
‘WE NEED TO GO BIG’
Scripps research oceanographers Grant Deane and Dale Stokes spearheaded development of the new facility in La Jolla, dubbed the Scripps Ocean Atmosphere Research Simulator, or SOARS.
The scientists were looking to replace an older ocean simulator built in the 1960s that was being decommissioned. There are dozens of similar facilities around the world.
“We looked at each other and went, ‘We need to go big,’” Deane said. “If we want to understand the consequences of burning fossil fuels, we have to understand how the ocean and the atmosphere mix.”
The team scored a major win in 2017 when the National Science Foundation awarded the university a $2.8-million grant to construct the new facility. The concept: allow researchers to study the interactions between wind, waves and microbial marine life with unprecedented accuracy. UCSD ponied up the rest of the cash, including an additional roughly $3 million for needed renovations to the building that houses the facility.
Similar to its predecessor, SOARS has a wave channel and a wind tunnel, which can generate roughly four-foot waves and now winds over 60 miles per hour. However, the simulator sets itself apart with an ability to filter the air and water, while also growing specific marine organisms using skylights known as “solar tubes.”
The concept for the ocean simulator drew from multiple disciplines and researchers, Deane said. The facility’s solar tubes, for example, were included based on input from Scripps microbiologists Farooq Azam. The late physical oceanographer Ken Melville also played a role.
“That was the genesis for this machine,” Deane said. “It’s a complex mixture of oceanography, biology and chemistry.”
SOARS has precise temperature controls that can mimic conditions ranging from tropical to Arctic. That extends to the main observation room in order to prevent its window to the wave channel from fogging up, Stokes explained.
“When this is in polar mode, you’re in here wearing a jacket,” he said. “We’ll have a rack of parkas outside.”
The facility’s monitoring equipment will include lasers and cameras to feed data into a central desktop computer. Scientists can also place probes and other instruments directly into the water by drilling through a long, narrow section of replaceable plexiglass on the channel’s tank.
“All the individual components have been worked out before, just never all brought together,” Stokes said.
RANGE OF RESEARCH
On a recent weekday morning, UCSD professor Drew Lucas brought an undergraduate class studying oceanic and atmospheric science to visit the new simulator. The facility will not only serve high-level research campaigns, he explained, but also students studying basic scientific concepts.
“You can go to the beach, but with this, you can do a controlled experiment,” he said. “It homes in on what the physics really are.”
Lucas also hopes to use the simulator for his own research on seagoing robots that could potentially use ocean currents to power their own propulsion.
“A big push is to figure out how to harvest energy from the environment to power vehicles,” he said. “A good example is a solar cell on a buoy or wave power.”
Prather also has other plans for SOARS. She wants to use the facility to investigate the transmission of diseases via ocean spray.
She’s taken a particular interest in the impacts of sewage-tainted runoff from Tijuana that routinely fouls shorelines in Imperial Beach. Bacteria and viruses could be “aerosolized in the surf zone,” she explained.
“People that live in Imperial Beach have serious respiratory issues, especially after it rains, when you think things would be cleaner,” said Prather, who’s formed relationships with local clinicians. “If you pump raw sewage in the ocean, some portion of that is going to come back out.”
Ideally, SOARS will be a focal point for a wide variety of “interdisciplinary campaigns,” Deane said, such as looking at issues around sea-level rise or the air-quality impacts of algae blooms.
“We’ll get eminent scientists and early career scientists,” he said. “We’ll get a broad range of people coming together and talking together, working together.”
WHAT MODELS MISS
The science around clouds and climate change recently recorded a notable breakthrough with a research paper published this summer in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Researchers from the Imperial College London found that it’s “very likely” that climate change’s impact on clouds will lead to more warming, not less.
The so-called cloud-feedback effect is still a source of uncertainty for climate modelers. But this recent analysis, involving global satellite observations, has given researchers more confidence that current models are on the right track.
“What we found is kind of middle of the road,” said Paulo Ceppi, the study’s lead author and climate scientist at Imperial College London. “It’s neither the case that clouds will strongly buffer global warming or lead to extremely fast warming. It’s moderately amplifying the effects of global warming.”
However, research efforts, such as those using UCSD’s new simulator, could turn up a wildcard, Ceppi said.
“If the biology in the ocean changes with warming, it could be something that all the models are missing,” he said. “I think that’s a concern. That’s a real problem, so it’s great that these people are investigating this.”
Prather has booked the simulator for experiments starting in June, which will examine gases and sea-spray aerosols coming out of the ocean at high winds to determine their impact on the formation of marine clouds. Testing on the facility will continue through early next year to ensure it’s properly calibrated.
Scientists outside of UCSD are also hoping to get hands-on experience with SOARS. That includes Tim Bertram, professor of chemistry, atmospheric and oceanic sciences at University of Wisconsin-Madison.
“To look at the ocean atmosphere is in some regards uncharted territory,” he said. “It can open doors to answer and probably even ask new questions.”
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