Support for Aerial Measurements (UAS, Aircraft, TBS)

[AdamTheisen]

Investigate different methods for QA/QC as applied to aerial data along with improved visualizations that could be incorporated into ACT in support of aerial data.

[AdamTheisen]

From Sid: segment information on what was happening in the flight. Need flight nodes to denote those periods. Can look at 1 minute averages

• Pitch angle
• External data from ceilometer for PBLHT
• Flagging in cloud vs out of cloud
• Other summary information

[AdamTheisen]

Example plots: https://plot.adc.arm.gov/PLOTS/cor/coraafdewpoint/20181202/coraafdewpointF1.a1.dewpoint_timeprofile.114432.20181202.png

[jrobrien91]

As @sgupta92 mentioned, defining periods of flight to allow for easier QA/QC or analysis of specific flight portions is typically done for every flight campaign and an utility to automatically do this for given input parameters would be beneficial to the community.

Typically this requires a 'summary' file, or a file created that contains necessary physical parameters (typically not housekeeping) from every instrument of interest to define the atmospheric environment.

Therefore, two modules would be needed:

1. Module to Create this summary file from necessary AAF datastreams, carefully considering time-syncs
   • Desired inputs:
     • Navigation: pressure & gps altitude, airspeed (indicated and true), lat, lon, flight orientation variables (alpha, beta, pitch and roll)
     • Environmental Parameters: total and ambient temperatures, dewpoint/frost points, RH, 3D wind speed/direction
     • Cloud Parameters: icing detector, cloud droplet concentration (forward scattering and optical array), liquid water content, total ice water content
     • Aerosol: bulk aerosol concentration, CCN concentration
2. Flight segments
   • using summary file, initially determine flight periods where aircraft is within cloud, ascending/descending, and level flight segments

[jrobrien91]

Maybe this could even be as easy as if the user is working with an AAF tagged file (e.g. aaf2dsh), a module that grabs the nav data for that given date and adds flags for flight modules into the aaf2dsh ACT object for the user automatically?

[jrobrien91]

With identified flight segments, eventually utilities such as normalization of cloud parameters for cloud thickness (Z_N) (Gupta et al. 2021) could be developed or spatial averages (e.g. avg 1km N_D) for level flight legs to directly compare against model/satellite

[sgupta92]

Along these lines, to improve and develop interactions between ARM and the satellite community, something that would go a long long way is co-location of ground obs/flight tracks with satellite overpasses. Satellite tracks are automated and available somewhere, then its just a matter of spatial co-location. But having that done already would remove a giant barrier when it comes to ARM data being used by anyone who uses satellite data.

[AdamTheisen]

Potential data source: https://www.iagos.org/