Menapia in ARIA's Forecasting Tipping Points programme

Some of the biggest uncertainties in climate science live in air we barely measure: the turbulent lowest kilometres over ice sheets and oceans, where heat, moisture and momentum are actually exchanged. Models have to approximate what happens there. The closer a system sits to a tipping point, the more those approximations cost.

ARIA — the UK's Advanced Research and Invention Agency — runs a programme aimed squarely at this: Forecasting Tipping Points, which sets out to build an early-warning system for two systems that could cross a threshold of irreversible change — the Greenland ice sheet and the North Atlantic's subpolar gyre. The approach is to blanket them with low-cost sensing, from the ocean floor to the upper atmosphere, and feed it into better models — because, as ARIA puts it, today's observational datasets are still at a nascent stage while the models can't capture every physical process.

Within Forecasting Tipping Points we're a delivery partner on two projects — OTTER and GAMB2LE. Here's what each is for.

OTTER — turbulence, measured with light

Turbulence is one of the hardest things to observe directly and one of the most important for getting atmospheric fluxes right. For OTTER, a Durham University project, we build and fly custom lightweight lasers to measure optical turbulence — and the surface heat fluxes it carries — along the beam. Read the OTTER case study.

GAMB2LE — flying where it's cold

GAMB2LE goes further north and colder. We're building an arctic-hardened drone-in-a-box to fly routinely from the Greenland ice sheet — part of AURORA, an atmospheric observatory studying the ice, the clouds above it, and the heat and moisture moving between them. Read the GAMB2LE case study.

Why it matters

The lower atmosphere is one of the most important and least-measured parts of the Earth system, and networks of small, automated profiling drones are an important tool to close that gap. A programme built around climate tipping points is the sharpest possible test of whether that approach works. The posts that follow get into the hardware, the field campaigns, and what we've actually measured — starting with the laser.