Portable Ice Nucleation Experiment (PINE)

The Portable Ice Nucleation Experiment (PINE) is the first fully-automated instrument for laboratory ice nucleation studies and long-term field observations of Ice Nucleating Particles (INPs) over a wide temperature range. PINE is based on a pumped expansion principle to induce ice and water supersaturated conditions for aerosol particles sampled either from laboratory setups or natural environments. The instrument is operated in repeated cycles of sampling the aerosol into a pre-cooled cloud chamber, activating the aerosol particles as supercooled droplets and ice crystals by expanding the air inside the cloud chamber and refilling the cloud chamber with fresh aerosol for the next cycle. Detailed information on the PINE can be obtained by Möhler et al., AMT, (2021).