Abstract. In this paper we describe and summarize the main achievements of the European Aerosol Cloud Climate and Air Quality Interactions project (EUCAARI). EUCAARI started on 1 January 2007 and ended on 31 December 2010 leaving a rich legacy including: (a) a comprehensive database with a year of observations of the physical, chemical and optical properties of aerosol particles over Europe, (b) comprehensive aerosol measurements in four developing countries, (c) a database of airborne measurements of aerosols and clouds over Europe during May 2008, (d) comprehensive modeling tools to study aerosol processes fron nano to global scale and their effects on climate and air quality. In addition a new Pan-European aerosol emissions inventory was developed and evaluated, a new cluster spectrometer was built and tested in the field and several new aerosol parameterizations and computations modules for chemical transport and global climate models were developed and evaluated. These achievements and related studies have substantially improved our understanding and reduced the uncertainties of aerosol radiative forcing and air quality-climate interactions. The EUCAARI results can be utilized in European and global environmental policy to assess the aerosol impacts and the corresponding abatement strategies.

International audienceA multi-platform field measurement campaign involving aircraft and balloons took place over West Africa between 26 July and 25 August 2006, in the frame of the concomitant AMMA Special Observing Period and SCOUT-O3 African tropical activities. Specifically aiming at sampling the upper troposphere and lower stratosphere, the high-altitude research aircraft M55 Geophysica was deployed in Ouagadougou (12.3° N, 1.7° W), Burkina Faso, in conjunction with the German D-20 Falcon, while a series of stratospheric balloons and sonde flights were conducted from Niamey (13.5° N, 2.0° E), Niger. Altogether, these measurements were intended to provide experimental evidence for a better understanding of large scale transport, assessing the effect of lightning on NOx production, and studying the impact of intense mesoscale convective systems on water, aerosol, dust and chemical species in the upper troposphere and lower stratosphere. The M55 Geophysica carried out five local and four transfer flights between southern Europe and the Sahel and back, while eight stratospheric balloons and twenty-nine sondes were flown from Niamey. These experiments allowed a characterization of the tropopause and lower stratosphere of the region. The paper provides an overview of SCOUT-AMMA campaign activities together with a description of the meteorology of the African monsoon and the situation prevailing during the flights and a brief summary of the observations accomplished

Abstract. This paper introduces a library of algorithms for representing cloud microphysics in numerical models. The library is written in C + +, hence the name libcloudph++. In the current release, the library covers three warm-rain schemes: the single-and double-moment bulk schemes, and the particle-based scheme with Monte Carlo coalescence. The three schemes are intended for modelling frameworks of different dimensionalities and complexities ranging from parcel models to multi-dimensional cloudresolving (e.g. large-eddy) simulations. A two-dimensional (2-D) prescribed-flow framework is used in the paper to illustrate the library features. The libcloudph++ and all its mandatory dependencies are free and open-source software. The Boost.units library is used for zero-overhead dimensional analysis of the code at compile time. The particlebased scheme is implemented using the Thrust library that allows one to leverage the power of graphics processing units (GPU), retaining the possibility of compiling the unchanged code for execution on single or multiple standard processors (CPUs). The paper includes a complete description of the programming interface (API) of the library and a performance analysis including comparison of GPU and CPU set-ups.