An intensive observation period was conducted in September 2017 in the central Namib, Namibia, as part of the project Namib Fog Life Cycle Analysis (NaFoLiCA). The purpose of the field campaign was to investigate the spatial and temporal patterns of the coastal fog that occurs regularly during nighttime and morning hours. The fog is often linked to advection of a marine stratus that intercepts with the terrain up to 100 km inland. Meteorological data, including cloud base height, fog deposition, liquid water path, and vertical profiles of wind speed/direction and temperature, were measured continuously during the campaign. Additionally, profiles of temperature and relative humidity were sampled during five selected nights with stratus/fog at both coastal and inland sites using tethered balloon soundings, drone profiling, and radiosondes. This paper presents an overview of the scientific goals of the field campaign; describes the experimental setup, the measurements carried out, and the meteorological conditions during the intensive observation period; and presents first results with a focus on a single fog event.

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Ice nucleating particles (INP) active at a few degrees below 0°C are produced by a range of organisms and released into the environment. They may affect cloud properties and precipitation when becoming airborne. So far, our knowledge about sources of biological INP is based on grab samples of vegetation, soil or water studied in the laboratory. By combining measurements of INP concentrations in river water with river water discharge rates over the course of 16 months, we obtained a lower limit for the production rate of INP in a watershed covering most of Switzerland (4 × 105 INP−8 m−2 d−1). Coincidentally, we found that INP−8 are likely to retain their potential for catalysing ice formation in the natural environment for at least several months before they are mobilized by an intensive rainfall, washed into the river and exported from the watershed.

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The Namib Turbulence EXperiment (NamTEX) was a multi-national micrometeorological campaign conducted in the Central Namib Desert to investigate three-dimensional surface layer turbulence and the spatio-temporal patterns of heat transfer between the sub-surface, surface, and atmosphere. The Namib provides an ideal location for fundamental research that revisits some key assumptions in micrometeorology that are implicitly included in the parameterizations describing energy exchange in weather forecasting and climate models: Homogenous flat surfaces, no vegetation, little moisture, and cloud-free skies create a strong and consistent diurnal forcing, resulting in a wide range of atmospheric stabilities. A novel combination of instruments was used to simultaneously measure variables and processes relevant to heat transfer: A three km fibre-optic distributed temperature sensor (DTS) was suspended in a pseudo-three-dimensional array within a 300 m x 300 m domain to provide vertical cross-sections of air temperature fluctuations. Aerial and ground-based thermal imagers recorded high resolution surface temperature fluctuations within the domain and revealed the spatial thermal imprint of atmospheric structures responsible for heat exchange. High-resolution soil temperature and moisture profiles together with heat flux plates provided information on near-surface soil dynamics. Turbulent heat exchange was measured with a vertical array of five eddy-covariance point measurements on a 21-m mast, as well as by co-located small- and large-aperture scintillometers. This contribution first details the scientific goals and experimental set-up of the NamTEX campaign. Then using a typical day, we demonstrate i) the coupling of surface layer, surface, and soil temperatures using high-frequency temperature measurements, ii) differences in spatial and temporal standard deviations of the horizontal temperature field using spatially distributed measurements, and iii) horizontal anisotropy of the turbulent temperature field.