Observations from the NOAA P-3 aircraft during ATOMIC

Abstract

Abstract. This paper describes observations obtained during the Atlantic Tradewind Ocean-Atmosphere Mesoscale Interaction Campaign (ATOMIC) by the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's (NOAA) Lockheed WP-3D Orion research aircraft based on the island of Barbados during the period Jan 17–Feb 11 2020. The aircraft obtained 95 hours of observations over eleven flights, many of which were coordinated with the NOAA research ship R/V Ronald H. Brown and autonomous platforms deployed from the ship. Each flight contained a mixture of sampling strategies including: high-altitude circles with frequent dropsonde deployment to characterize the large-scale environment; slow descents and ascents to measure the distribution of water vapor and its isotopic composition; stacked legs aimed at sampling the microphysical and thermodynamic state of the boundary layer; and offset straight flight legs for observing clouds and the ocean surface with remote sensing instruments and the thermal structure of the ocean with in situ sensors dropped from the plane. The characteristics of the it in situ observations, expendable devices, and remote sensing instrumentation are described, as is the processing used in deriving estimates of physical quantities. Data archived at the National Center for Environmental Information include flight-level data such as aircraft navigation and basic thermodynamic information (https://doi.org/10.25921/7jf5-wv54); high-accuracy measurements of water vapor concentration from an isotope analyzer (https://doi.org/10.25921/c5yx-7w29); profiles of sea water temperature made with Airborne eXpendable BathyThermographs (AXBTs, https://doi.org/10.25921/pe39-sx75); profiles of radar reflectivity, Doppler velocity, and spectrum width from a nadir-looking W-band (94 GHz) radar (https://doi.org/10.25921/n1hc-dc30); estimates of cloud presence, the cloud top location, and the cloud-top radar reflectivity and temperature, along with estimates of 10-m wind speed obtained from remote sensing instruments operating in the microwave and thermal infrared spectral regions (https://doi.org/10.25921/x9q5-9745); and ocean surface wave characteristics from a Wide Swath Radar Altimeter (https://doi.org/10.25921/qm06-qx04). Data are provided as netCDF files following Climate and Forecast conventions.

From Sugar to Flowers: A Transition of Shallow Cumulus Organization During ATOMIC

“…A field campaign designed to study shallow convection in the trade wind region occurred in January–February, 2020 in the Atlantic Ocean east of Barbados. The Atlantic Tradewind Ocean‐Atmosphere Mesoscale Interaction Campaign (ATOMIC) and its European counterpart called Elucidating the Role of Clouds‐Circulation Coupling in Climate (EUREC 4 A) formed a field campaign that used instruments on research aircrafts and ships to observe the properties of shallow cumulus clouds in order to better understand their relationship with the large‐scale environment (Bony et al., 2017; Pincus et al., 2021; Quinn et al., 2020; Stevens et al., 2021). Recent studies (i.e., Bony et al., 2020; Rasp et al., 2020; Stevens et al., 2020) have categorized the mesoscale organization of shallow cumuli based on the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) imagery into four types: sugar, gravel, fish, and flowers.…”

EUREC<sup>4</sup>A observations from the SAFIRE ATR42 aircraft

“…To elucidate the couplings between clouds and circulation, the nucleus of the experimental strategy was based on the coordinated and repeated flight plans of two core platforms : the High Altitude and Long-range Research Aircraft (HALO) operated by the German Aerospace Center (Konow et al, 2021), and the ATR-42 (hereafter referred to as ATR) operated by the French Service des Avions Français Instrumentés pour la Recherche en Environnment (SAFIRE). These airborne operations were augmented with other platforms operating within the same area, including the Twin Otter operated by the British Antarctic Survey (Blyth et al, in prep), the P-3 aircraft operated by NOAA (Pincus et al, 2021), a Barbadian aircraft operated by the Regional Security System (RSS), the BOREAL and Skywalkers UAVs operated by Météo-France, and the CU-RAAVEN UAV operated by the University of Colorado (de Boer et al, 2021). In addition, ground and ship-based observations from the Barbados Cloud Observatory (Stevens et al, 2016) and a research vessel (R/V Meteor) were continuously documenting the atmospheric state on the western and eastern sides of the ATR operations area, respectively.…”

JOANNE : Joint dropsonde Observations of the Atmosphere in tropical North atlaNtic meso-scale Environments

“…For instance, HALO typically separated a set of three standard EUREC 4 A-circles by an upwind 'excursion' toward the Northwest Tropical Atlantic Station buoy (NTAS) near 51.02°W, 14.82°N, along which 1 to 3 sondes were launched per flight. Konow et al (2021) and Pincus et al (2021), respectively.…”

“…The flight phase segmentation (FPS) files for HALO (Konow et al, 2021) and for P3 (Pincus et al, 2021) are used for identifying the circles and the dropsondes corresponding to these circle segments. To facilitate ease of working with JOANNE and the FPS files, the circle segments in JOANNE Level-4 have been tagged with the same segment IDs as those in the FPS files.…”