A first highlight of the now one-and-a-half years of LACROS measurements over Punta Arenas is now published in Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics:

Ohneiser, K., Ansmann, A., Baars, H., Seifert, P., Barja, B., Jimenez, C., Radenz, M., Teisseire, A., Floutsi, A., Haarig, M., Foth, A., Chudnovsky, A., Engelmann, R., Zamorano, F., Bühl, J., Wandinger, U., 2020. Smoke of extreme Australian bushfires observed in the stratosphere over Punta Arenas, Chile, in January 2020: optical thickness, lidar ratios, and depolarization ratios at 355 and 532 nm. Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics 20, 8003–8015. https://doi.org/10.5194/acp-20-8003-2020

The paper describes the plume of wildfire smoke form Australia observed earlier that year. A stratospheric aerosol optical thickness of 0.85 caused by smoke is unprecedented in the southern hemisphere.

Another paper is also on it's way to publication in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society. There, the Year of Polar Prediction community uses water vapor observations from LACROS to investigate atmospheric rivers on their way to Antarctica:

Bromwich, D.H., Werner, K., Casati, B., Powers, J.G., Gorodetskaya, I.V., Massonnet, F., Vitale, V., Heinrich, V.J., Liggett, D., Arndt, S., Barja, B., Bazile, E., Carpentier, S., Carrasco, J.F., Choi, T., Choi, Y., Colwell, S.R., Cordero, R.R., Gervasi, M., Haiden, T., Hirasawa, N., Inoue, J., Jung, T., Kalesse, H., Kim, S.-J., Lazzara, M.A., Manning, K.W., Norris, K., Park, S.-J., Reid, P., Rigor, I., Rowe, P.M., Schmithüsen, H., Seifert, P., Sun, Q., Uttal, T., Zannoni, M., Zou, X., 2020. The Year of Polar Prediction in the Southern Hemisphere (YOPP-SH). Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society 101, E1653–E1676. https://doi.org/10.1175/BAMS-D-19-0255.1

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