A23B-0291
Airborne Measurements in Support of the NASA Atmospheric Carbon and Transport - America (ACT-America) Mission

Tuesday, 15 December 2015
Poster Hall (Moscone South)
Byron Meadows1, Ken Davis2, John D W Barrick3, Edward V Browell3, Gao Chen4, Jeremy T Dobler5, Alan Fried6, Thomas Lauvaux7, Bing Lin1, Matthew J McGill8, Natasha L Miles7, Amin R Nehrir1, Michael D Obland1, Christopher O'Dell9, Colm Sweeney10 and Melissa M Yang1, (1)NASA Langley Research Center, Hampton, VA, United States, (2)Pennsylvania State University Penn State Erie Behrend College, Erie, PA, United States, (3)Science Systems and Applications, Inc. Hampton, Hampton, VA, United States, (4)NASA Langley Research Ctr, Hampton, VA, United States, (5)ITT Space Systems, LLC, Fort Wayne, IN, United States, (6)Univ of Colorado, Boulder, CO, United States, (7)Pennsylvania State University Main Campus, University Park, PA, United States, (8)NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, MD, United States, (9)Colorado State University, Fort Collins, CO, United States, (10)NOAA Boulder, ESRL, Boulder, CO, United States
Abstract:
NASA announced the research opportunity Earth Venture Suborbital - 2 (EVS-2) mission in support of the NASA’s science strategic goals and objectives in 2013. Penn State University, NASA Langley Research Center (LaRC), and other academic institutions, government agencies, and industrial companies together formulated and proposed the Atmospheric Carbon and Transport – America (ACT – America) suborbital mission, which was subsequently selected for implementation. The airborne measurements that are part of ACT-America will provide a unique set of remote and in-situ measurements of CO2 over North America at spatial and temporal scales not previously available to the science community and this will greatly enhance our understanding of the carbon cycle.

ACT - America will consist of five airborne campaigns, covering all four seasons, to measure regional atmospheric carbon distributions and to evaluate the accuracy of atmospheric transport models used to assess carbon sinks and sources under fair and stormy weather conditions. This coordinated mission will measure atmospheric carbon in the three most important regions of the continental US carbon balance: Northeast, Midwest, and South. Data will be collected using 2 airborne platforms (NASA Wallops’ C-130 and NASA Langley’s B-200) with both in-situ and lidar instruments, along with instrumented ground towers and under flights of the Orbiting Carbon Observatory (OCO-2) satellite. This presentation provides an overview of the ACT-America instruments, with particular emphasis on the airborne CO2 and backscatter lidars, and the, rationale, approach, and anticipated results from this mission.

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