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Portable Ice Nucleation Experiment (PINE)

A close-up view of a machine labeled "PINE" featuring a large screen and a sleek blue and black design.
A large, blue and black PINE research equipment with a digital display, located in a laboratory setting.

Ice-nucleating particles (INPs) are rare—approximately one in a million atmospheric particles nucleate ice. Yet, INPs regulate ice formation in mixed-phase clouds, influencing cloud lifetime, albedo, and precipitation. The rate and onset of freezing depends on the temperature, ambient humidity/ice supersaturation, freezing mode (immersion, deposition, condensation, contact), particle attributes (composition, surface structure, size, coatings/mixing state, aging), and experimental timescales/conditions (cooling rate, residence time, solution effects). Therefore, time- and temperature-resolved measurements with adequate context are required to relate ambient aerosols to cloud ice formation, precipitation, and water cycles.  

The Environmental Molecular Sciences Laboratory’s (EMSL’s) Portable Ice Nucleation Experiment (PINE) is a portable cloud expansion chamber that performs automated, online INP measurements across controlled temperature scans. PINE yields a time-resolved INP concentration that is suitable for continuous field deployments or laboratory studies with different types of aerosols (biological, organic-rich, internally or externally mixed particles, soil and mineral dust particles) under cloud-relevant conditions, spanning mixed-phase regimes (approximately −10 to −35 °C) and cirrus regimes (approximately −35 to −60 °C). PINE is hosted at EMSL to provide continuous and automated INP measurements, which are critical for robust parameterization development for Earth system models. EMSL users can employ PINE to quantify INP concentrations as a function of the temperature, resolve the temporal variability, and assess how sources and atmospheric processing modulate ice-nucleation efficiency. 

Research application 

Tips for success  

  • Deployment planning: Specify the desired temperature scan range and time resolution; identify site power/environmental needs for autonomous operation. 
  • Context data: Coordinate meteorological and aerosol characterization (e.g., co-located instruments, trajectories) to interpret INP variability. 
  • Operations, quality control, and quality analysis: Plan for background/zero checks and routine instrument health monitoring during long-term runs. 
  • Proposal notes: Describe the scientific objective, study period, location, and any desired integration with EMSL analytics (i.e., microscopy/spectroscopy) for source/process attribution. 
  • Field logistics: Confirm site power, enclosure/weather needs, and data access before deployment. 

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