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Community Instruments and Facility Program

This facility is part of the National Science Foundation (NSF) Community Instruments and Facility (CIF) suite pool sponsored by the FARE program. A complete list of facilities can be found here: https://www.nsf.gov/geo/ags/programs/fare/.

Facility Overview

CIF makes the ice nucleation cold-stage available to the atmospheric science community for investigation of ice nucleating particle concentrations. The CIF comprises the cold-stage cell, cooling system, observation optics, software for data acquisition and image analysis, and a set of samplers.

The cold stage consists of a thermally controlled surface. The surface is cooled using a series of thermoelectric elements. In this version, the surface is imaged using a macrolens, but the optics can be switched to a stereomicroscope. The instrument can be operated in multiple modes, utilizing water droplet volumes ranging over approximately 4 orders of magnitude from 0.25 nL to 1 muL.

Contact

Interested? Contact: Markus Petters, markus.petters@ucr.edu.

Acknowledgements

The instrument was developed and characterized using funding from the National Science Foundation awards NSF-AGS 1010851 and NSF-AGS 1450690. The CIF is supported via NSF-AGS 2112978.