Data coverage
The ACT-America Campaign Catalog provides information about the airborne campaigns of the Atmospheric Carbon and Transport (ACT-America) project. ACT-America advanced atmospheric greenhouse gas inversions to a high level of accuracy and precision through new methods and models that improved knowledge of atmospheric transport, prior flux models, and space-based observations. The catalog compiles flight details for the five campaigns conducted during Summer 2016, Winter 2017, Fall 2017, Spring 2018, and Summer 2019 (2016-05-27 to 2019-07-26) across three regions of the eastern and central United States. Data include flight dates, regions, objectives, weather conditions, instrument status, aircraft flight paths, detailed weather reports, and measurement summary figures. A total of 121 research flights were conducted within the five six-week seasonal campaigns by each of the two instrumented aircraft platforms, the NASA Langley Beechcraft B-200 King Air and the NASA Wallops Flight Facility's C-130 Hercules. During 1,140 flight hours remote and in situ sensors onboard the two research aircraft measured greenhouse gas mole fractions, trace gases, and thermodynamic variables across a variety of continental surfaces and atmospheric conditions to study the transport and fluxes of atmospheric carbon dioxide and methane. As noted in the Flightpatternsstaus field, there were flights when both aircraft flew directly under Orbiting Carbon Observatory-2 (OCO-2) overpasses to evaluate the ability of OCO-2 to observe high-resolution atmospheric CO2 variations. The C-130 aircraft was also equipped with active remote sensing instruments for planetary boundary layer height detection and column greenhouse gas measurements. The data are provided in comma separated values (CSV), compressed Keyhole Markup Language (KMZ) formats along with figures as JPEG and Portable Network Graphics images. CPLABLTopHeight1825 This dataset consists of the atmospheric boundary layer (ABL) top heights and the altitudes of the two additional aerosol layers (in km above mean sea level) derived from Cloud Physics Lidar (CPL) measurements using the Haar wavelet transform method. The CPL instrument was deployed onboard NASA's C-130 aircraft to obtain aerosol backscatter profiles during four ACT-America field campaigns (Summer 2016, Winter 2017, Fall 2017, and Spring 2018). CPL is a backscatter lidar designed to operate simultaneously at three wavelengths. The profiles were collected at 4-second temporal and 30 m vertical resolutions. The time resolution of the provided CPL-derived ABL top heights and other aerosol layers are 8 seconds. ACTCASAEnsemblePriorFluxes1675 This data set provides gridded, model-derived gross primary productivity (GPP), ecosystem respiration (RECO), and net ecosystem exchange (NEE) of CO2 biogenic fluxes and their uncertainties at monthly and 3-hourly time scales over 2003-2019 on a 463-m spatial resolution grid for the conterminous United States (CONUS) and on both 5-km and half-degree spatial resolution grids for North America (NA). The biogeochemical model Carnegie Ames Stanford Approach (CASA) was used. HALOLiDARAOPMLHeights1833 This dataset provides measurements from the High Altitude Lidar Observatory (HALO) instrument, an airborne multi-function Differential Absorption Lidar (DIAL) and High Spectral Resolution Lidar (HSRL), operating at 532 nm and 1064 nm wavelengths onboard a C-130 aircraft during the June and July 2019 ACT-America campaign. The flights took place over eastern and central North America based from Shreveport, Louisiana; Lincoln, Nebraska; and NASA Wallops Flight Facility located on the eastern shore of Virginia. HALO data were sampled at 0.5 s temporal and 1.25 m vertical resolutions. The data include profiles of aerosol optical properties (AOP), distributions of mixed layer heights (MLH), columns of tropospheric methane, and navigation parameters. The data are provided in HDF5 format along with PNG images and a companion files in Portable Document (.pdf) format. ACTAMERICAMFLLL11817 This dataset provides Level 1 (L1) remotely sensed differential absorption optical depth (DAOD) measurements made through the Multi-Functional Fiber Laser Lidar (MFLL; Harris Corporation) during airborne campaigns in Summer 2016, Winter 2017, Fall 2017, and Spring 2018 conducted over central and eastern regions of the United States for the Atmospheric Carbon and Transport (ACT-America) project. DAOD were measured at 0.1 second frequency during flights of the C-130 Hercules aircraft at altitudes up to 8 km with MFLL. The MFLL is a set of Continuous-Wave (CW) lidar instruments consisting of an intensity modulated multi-frequency single-beam synchronous-detection Laser Absorption Spectrometer (LAS) operating at 1571 nm for measuring the column amount of CO2 number density and range between the aircraft and the surface or to cloud tops, and surface reflectance and a Pseudo-random Noise (PN) altimeter at 1596 nm for measuring the path length from the aircraft to the scattering surface and/or cloud tops. The MFLL was onboard all ACT-America seasonal campaigns, except Summer 2019. Complete aircraft flight information, interpolated to the 0.1 second column CO2 reporting frequency, are included, but not limited to, latitude, longitude, altitude, and attitude. Data users should note that a Level 2 (L2) MFLL data product is available (related dataset) that contains all data variables (plus the column-average CO2) included in this L1 MFLL data product but has undergone additional processing and calibrations and is recommended for most use cases. ACTAMERICAHskping1574 This dataset provides aircraft navigational parameters and related meteorological data (often referred to as "housekeeping" data) in support of the research activities for the two aircrafts that flew for the NASA Atmospheric Carbon and Transport-America (ACT-America) project. ACT-America's mission spans five years and includes five 6-week intensive field campaigns covering all 4 seasons and 3 regions of the central and eastern United States. Two instrumented aircraft platforms, the NASA Langley Beechcraft B200 King Air and the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center's C-130H Hercules, were used to collect high-quality in situ measurements across a variety of continental surfaces and atmospheric conditions. During these flights, aircraft positional, meteorological, and environmental data are recorded by a variety of instruments. For this dataset, measurements include, but are not limited to: latitude, longitude, altitude, ground speed, air temperature, and wind speed and direction. These data are incorporated into related ACT-America flight-instrumented datasets to provide geotrajectory file information for position, attitude, and altitude awareness of instrumented sampling. InsituTowerGreenhouseGas1798 This dataset provides Level 1 (L1) in situ atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2), carbon monoxide (CO), and methane (CH4) concentrations as measured on a network of instrumented communications towers across the central and eastern USA operated by the Atmospheric Carbon and Transport-America (ACT-America) project. There were 11 towers instrumented with cavity ring-down spectrometers (CRDS; Picarro Inc.) with measurements beginning in January 2015 and continuing to October 2019. The measurement period varied by tower site. The Picarro analyzers continuously measured total CH4, isotopic ratio of CH4, CO2, CO, and other greenhouse gas concentrations. Not all species were measured at all sites. Complete tower location, elevation, instrument height, and date/time information are also provided. Determination of greenhouse gas fluxes and uncertainty bounds is essential for the evaluation of the effectiveness of mitigation strategies. These L1 data are raw instrument outputs from the Picarro instruments. A Level 2 (L2) product derived from this L1 data is available and generally would be the preferred data for most use cases. ACTAMERICAPI
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