The 2014 ASCENDS Field Campaign - a Carbon Dioxide Laser Absorption Spectrometer Perspective

Abstract:

NASA’s ASCENDS mission has been flying several candidate lidar instruments on board the NASA DC-8 aircraft to obtain column integrated measurements of Carbon Dioxide. Each instrument uses a different approach to making the measurement and combined they have allowed for the informed development of the ASCENDS mission measurement requirements⁽¹⁾.

The JPL developed Carbon Dioxide Laser Absorption Spectrometer, CO2LAS is one of these instruments. The CO2LAS measures the weighted, column averaged carbon dioxide between the aircraft and the ground using a continuous-wave heterodyne technique. The instrument operates at a 2.05 micron wavelength optimized for enhancing sensitivity to boundary layer carbon dioxide. Since the 2013 field campaign the instrument has undergone significant upgrades that improve the data collection efficiency and instrument stability and has recently been re-integrated onto the NASA DC-8 for the August 2014 ASCENDS field campaign.

This presentation will summarize the instrument and algorithm improvements and review the 2014 field campaign flights and preliminary results.

(1) Abshire, J.B. et al., “An overview of NASA’s ASCENDS Mission lidar measurement requirements”, submitted to 2014 Fall AGU Conference.