The cleanest air in the world is at Tasmania's Kennaook Cape Grim. It's helping solve a climate puzzle

It's a place that feels like the edge of the world, where a wild and rugged coastline is frequently lashed by winds carrying some of the purest air on the planet. The air, I don't know if it's just me, but it's so crisp and clean and you feel like you feel like you can breathe it properly. It's magnificent. While locals love the northwest tip of Tasmania, scientists are also making the most of its unique location. When the wind blows in from the sea, it's travelled across the Southern Ocean from as far away as Antarctica, meaning it's avoided the contaminants like dust from land masses and The Dirty pollution of cities. The air here under baseline conditions is very, very clean. So it's 1000 times cleaner in terms of the number of particles that than that we would measure in Melbourne for example. And that's Melbourne on a good day. The kennel Cape Grimm air monitoring station was set up almost 50 years ago. Its measurements are considered to be an accurate baseline of the global atmosphere because it's free from that local contamination. In a nutshell, we measure our greenhouse gases and ozone depleting substances. We also measure the aerosols and reactive gases through a series of instruments. Air gets channelled into a laboratory where high tech gadgets analyse the physical and chemical properties of the incoming flow 6 * a year. Liquid nitrogen is used to chill high pressure tanks that suck in thousands of litres of baseline air, adding to an archive that now dates back almost 5 decades. And what it's enabled us to do is by filling multiple cylinders per year over many years, that we can go back and actually analyse old air when we get new instrumental techniques. The air archive reflects the human impact on the planet's rapidly changing atmosphere, which has seen a 25% rise in carbon dioxide since the first tank was filled in the late 1970s. But while scientists have a clear picture of the past, the computations used to forecast future changes are lacking critical data. Almost all of that uncertainty in climate models has to do with our ability to, or our lack of ability to, represent clouds very, very well. Australian and US researchers have now teamed up here at Kennewal, Cape Grim, as part of an international mission designed to unravel some of the mysteries of clouds in the Southern Ocean. When clouds form in freezing conditions, tiny particles like dust and pollution can trigger ice crystals to develop. But because the air is cleaner in the Southern Ocean, the water droplets remain in a super cool liquid state. These liquid clouds reflect more sunlight back into space, which means less heat is absorbed by the ocean. This phenomenon isn't accurately accounted for in current climate models, so we have a lot of instruments, radars and lidars and cameras that are constantly scanning these clouds to tell us what kind they are, how high they are, what they're made of. Do they have ice? Are they super cooled liquid? The cloud project is set to run for the next 18 months, providing critical information that scientists hope can better prepare us for the changing climate.