In-Situ Evidence for a Strong Seasonal Variability of Meteor Smoke at High Northern Latitudes and Implications for Mesospheric ice Nucleation

We report on new in situ measurements of meteor smoke particles (MSPs) and their mesospheric environment from three international field campaigns at the North-Norwegian Andoya Rocket Range. These are the ECOMA campaigns in 2006 and 2008 and the joint ECOMA/MASS campaign in 2007. During these campaigns a total of 6 sounding rockets were successfully launched. The prime instrument of the ECOMA- payload is a detector making use of active photoionization of MSPs and the subsequent detection of corresponding photoelectrons. During the first flight in September 2006, MSPs were detected throughout the mesosphere with concentrations in reasonable agreement with predictions from microphysical models. All later flights with this detector under polar summer conditions, however, do not show any detectable MSP concentration at altitudes below ~75 km, whereas the detector did detect signatures of mesospheric ice particles at about 83 km during all flights. In each of these cases, the mesospheric ice detection is unequivocally confirmed by simultaneous photometer measurements of noctilucent cloud particles on the same rocket payloads. Also, the electrostatic mass spectrometer for nanometer-sized charged aerosol particles MASS which was launched close to the ECOMA-rocket in 2007 did not detect any particle signatures outside the mesospheric ice region. We critically discuss these observations in the context of MSP- and ice particle-microphysics of the mesosphere using simultaneous measurements of the ambient plasma from the same sounding rockets as well as satellite observations of nitric oxide from the Canadian ACE satellite. Taking further into account high resolution temperature measurements from each rocket payload, we tentatively draw conclusions on the feasibility of different potential nucleation pathways such as heterogeneous nucleation on neutral and/or charged MSPs, ionic nucleation, and homogeneous nucleation in the presence of pronounced temperature fluctuations owing to gravity waves.