Fennec

My work on the Fenenc project involved studying the optical, microphysical and radiative properties of mineral dust in order to determine its role in the Saharan heat low, based on aircraft measurements over the Sahara during June 2011 and 2012. These have been published as follows:

• Ryder et al., 2013a, GRL, Impact of Atmospheric Transport on the Evolution of Microphysical and Optical Properties of Saharan Dust - specifically changes in size distribution and absorption from freshly uplifted dust close to the source, aged dust over the Sahara, and dust transported over the Eastern Atlantic Ocean. Data
• Ryder et al., 2013b, ACP, Optical properties of Saharan dust aerosol and contribution from the coarse mode as measured during the Fennec 2011 aircraft campaign - Detailed optical property measurements from Fennec. Data
• Ryder et al., 2015, ACP - Advances in understanding mineral dust and boundary layer processes over the Sahara from Fennec aircraft observations - Fennec Aircraft Overview Paper.

Fennec Project links:

• Oxford University Fennec Project Website, including the Fennec Movie: Into the Cauldron. The film was shown at the EGU 2013 Geocinema in Vienna.
• Fennec Wikipedia Page

In total there have been three Fennec aircraft campaigns, with flights over the western Sahara. These took place in April 2011, June 2011 and June 2012. During June 2011 both the UK BAe146 FAAM aircraft and the French SAFIRE Falcon were operational.

The aircraft campaigns involved flights over Mauritania and Mali. This has provided a fantastic dataset of measurements of dust close to the Saharan Heat Low, and new instruments on the FAAM BAe146 are enabling us to get to grips much better with coarse mode size distribution measurements and optical properties measured by the FAAM BAe146.

Of particular interest was the measurement of coarse and 'super-coarse' or 'giant' particles, sized up to 300 microns diameter found up to 1 kilometre above the desert surface, and the presence of particles sized up to 50-60 microns diamter up to 3 km on a regular basis. These findings can be attributed to the FAAM aircraft being instrumented to measure much larger particles than typically assumed for dust, and also to flying very close to dust sources over the remote central Sahara. These results are published in Ryder et al., 2013a, GRL, and Ryder et al., 2013b, ACP - see My Publications.

Click here to read a blog article I wrote for our department about what it's like to take part in an aircraft campaign in 2011.

Click here to see satellite images of the dust events during our 2011 flying