HR: 0800h
AN: A11C-0073    [Abstracts]
TI: Using the Altair UAV to Address Radiative Balance and Chemistry in the Troposphere: Instrumentation Designed to Tackle Climate Change, Regional Scale Pollution Plumes, and Photochemical Mechanisms
AU: * Engel, G S
EM: gsengel@huarp.harvard.edu
AF: Harvard Univeristy, 12 Oxford St., Cambridge, MA 02138 United States
AU: Anderson, J G
EM: anderson@huarp.harvard.edu
AF: Harvard Univeristy, 12 Oxford St., Cambridge, MA 02138 United States
AB: Understanding the feedback mechanisms relevant to climate change requires a concerted effort interleaving validated satellite measurements, fine-scale in situ measurements, and adaptive modeling. NASA's Altair UAV platform, having peak altitudes of 52,000 feet and flight times of 32 hours, provides a unique opportunity for monitoring pollution plumes, validating AURA measurements, and dissecting fine-scale mechanistic questions. We present a payload design capable of addressing many key scientific questions and fully realizing the capabilities of this new aircraft. By sharing common subsystems, utilizing miniaturized lasers and implementing miniature detectors, an unprecedented number of critical measurements can be acquired from a single platform, providing a superior context for modeling and validation. These measurements will serve to validate and extend key Aura measurements, providing fine-resolution measurements over long time scales that can be used for validation, model initialization, and correlation. Coupling measurements of water vapor, total water, cloud structure, and ozone with CO, CO2, N2O, and CH4 tracer fields, this payload will offer new insight into the evolution of convective systems, water transport, and photochemical mechanisms. This Altair instrument package can also image small-scale transport phenomena by monitoring water isotope ratios and carbon monoxide in conjunction with cloud profiles. Ozone and halogen measurements will provide a definitive appraisal of the recovery of the stratosphere while monitoring species (e.g., BrO) suggested as major contributors to mid-latitude ozone loss. As local and regional phenomena begin to have marked impacts on a global scale, NASA is uniquely positioned with Altair UAV to support instrumentation to provide the critical links between satellite measurements and in situ measurements. Bridging this gap with long observation periods and fine spatial resolution allows measurements to be performed systematically both for validation and to identify episodic phenomena that are not well resolved by satellite data. Linking these in situ data to satellite data is a critical step in understanding the evolution of the climate system.
DE: 1610 Atmosphere (0315, 0325)
DE: 0320 Cloud physics and chemistry
DE: 0345 Pollution--urban and regional (0305)
DE: 0365 Troposphere--composition and chemistry
DE: 0394 Instruments and techniques
SC: Atmospheric Sciences [A]
MN: 2004 AGU Fall Meeting