Emiliano Stopelli

AS Atmospheric Sciences

The 2016 Outstanding Student Poster and PICO (OSPP) Award is awarded to Emiliano Stopelli for the poster/PICO entitled:

Landscape-precipitation feedback mediated by ice nuclei: an example from the Arctic (Stopelli, E.; Conen, F.; Zimmermann, L.; Morris, C.; Alewell, C.)

Click here to download the poster/PICO file.

What are the mutual feedbacks between land use and climate mediated by biological aerosols? I am Emiliano Stopelli, PhD working in the group of Environmental Geosciences at the University of Basel, Switzerland. My research interest is to describe the role ice nuclei (IN) of biological origin on the formation of precipitation. This poster presents a sampling campaign carried out in North Norway in summer 2015 to study the abundance of airborne biological IN in the Arctic. Air masses passing over the land result enriched in IN, and decaying leaf litter is pointed at as best candidate to emit IN in this region. The Arctic constitutes a fascinating open air laboratory to study the effects of climate change, specifically of the decrease of snow cover associated with the increased presence of vegetation, on the release of biological IN in the atmosphere.

Publication resulting from the award

Stopelli, E., Conen, F., Guilbaud, C., Zopfi, J., Alewell, C., and Morris, C. E.: Ice nucleators, bacterial cells and Pseudomonas syringae in precipitation at Jungfraujoch, Biogeosciences, 14, 1189–1196, https://doi.org/10.5194/bg-14-1189-2017, 2017.