Clouds play an important role in Arctic amplification. This term represents the recently observed enhanced warming of the Arctic relative to the global increase of near-surface air temperature. However, there are still important knowledge gaps regarding the interplay between Arctic clouds and aerosol particles, and surface properties, as well as turbulent and radiative fluxes that inhibit accurate model simulations of clouds in the Arctic climate system. In an attempt to resolve this so-called Arctic cloud puzzle, two comprehensive and closely coordinated field studies were conducted: the Arctic Cloud Observations Using Airborne Measurements during Polar Day (ACLOUD) aircraft campaign and the Physical Feedbacks of Arctic Boundary Layer, Sea Ice, Cloud and Aerosol (PASCAL) ice breaker expedition. Both observational studies were performed in the framework of the German Arctic Amplification: Climate Relevant Atmospheric and Surface Processes, and Feedback Mechanisms (AC) project. They took place in the vicinity of Svalbard, Norway, in May and June 2017. ACLOUD and PASCAL explored four pieces of the Arctic cloud puzzle: cloud properties, aerosol impact on clouds, atmospheric radiation, and turbulent dynamical processes. The two instrumented Polar 5 and Polar 6 aircraft; the icebreaker Research Vessel (R/V) Polarstern; an ice floe camp including an instrumented tethered balloon; and the permanent ground-based measurement station at Ny-Ålesund, Svalbard, were employed to observe Arctic low- and mid-level mixed-phase clouds and to investigate related atmospheric and surface processes. The Polar 5 aircraft served as a remote sensing observatory examining the clouds from above by downward-looking sensors; the Polar 6 aircraft operated as a flying in situ measurement laboratory sampling inside and below the clouds. Most of the collocated Polar 5/6 flights were conducted either above the R/V Polarstern or over the Ny-Ålesund station, both of which monitored the clouds from below using similar but upward-looking remote sensing techniques as the Polar 5 aircraft. Several of the flights were carried out underneath collocated satellite tracks. The paper motivates the scientific objectives of the ACLOUD/PASCAL observations and describes the measured quantities, retrieved parameters, and the applied complementary instrumentation. Furthermore, it discusses selected measurement results and poses critical research questions to be answered in future papers analyzing the data from the two field campaigns.
ith this eleventh issue, aspeers continues its remarkable journey into a new decade, and that sentence alone gives testament to the success of its mission. From its first year on, aspeers worked on the assumption that American studies, a small but innovative and energetic field, would produce enough excellent, publishable scholarship written by graduate students in Europe alone to justify an annual journal. But the assumption was always a gamble, and one that almost every foreword kept belaboring, signaling that the journal's ongoing success was a matter not just of confidence but also of concern-at least for the longest time.
t is not an exaggeration to say that 2020 was a year full of fundamental global challenges and periods of disruption-certainly also impacting the way that we think about (and practically do) university teaching and learning. As such, aspeers, too, was not exempt from these changes and developments, being both a scholarly and a didactic project. As the COVID-19 pandemic led to online teaching proliferating in universities around the world, and while we slowly grew more accustomed to seeing each other only on Zoom calls, there was uncertainty whether such remote-teaching formats were also possible for a project like aspeers. Would it even be a project-or rather, feel like one-if the graduate editors never sat in a room together, physically interacting with one another while they discussed and debated the submissions they received? Could a schedule be conceived and timelines be kept when everything might feel slightly less 'real' due to the format's purely digital nature? Would collaborative tasks and communication within the group work out over email, in Zoom, or via other tools-and all this in a considerably shorter semester? Several months later, we can now answer these and many related questions squarely in the affirmative: Even in the midst of all these changes and challenges, a new issue of aspeers once again lies before us, largely the result of the hard work of this year's graduate editors.
years. 3 MLA editions. 16 professorial voices. 37 art contributions. 58 authors. 111 editors. 656 footnotes. 1,503 pages. 33,300 hours of work done by student editors. aspeers by the numbers gives an indication of the scope of a project that began over a decade ago with a seemingly simple question: "Is there a demand for a graduate-level publication in European American Studies?" (Koenen and Herrmann iii). In each of the years to follow, this question was answered in the affirmative, and so the journal grew and prospered, offering graduate students a space for inquiry and analysis, debate and exploration. While the mere numbers give evidence of the productivity of the student editors, contributors, and faculty members in terms of quantity on the one hand, they also show the quality of our teamwork, of the collaboration efforts, and-yes-of the resilience involved.
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