Abstract
Abstract. In July 2018, the University of Oklahoma deployed three CopterSonde remotely piloted aircraft systems (RPASs) to take measurements of the evolving thermodynamic and kinematic state of the atmospheric boundary layer (ABL) over complex terrain in the San Luis Valley, Colorado. A total of 180 flights were completed over 5 d, with teams operating simultaneously at two different sites in the northern half of the valley. A total of 2 d of operations focused on convection initiation studies, 1 d focused on ABL diurnal transition studies, 1 d focused on internal comparison flights, and the last day of operations focused on cold air drainage flows. The data from these coordinated flights provide insight into the horizontal heterogeneity of the atmospheric state over complex terrain. This dataset, along with others collected by other universities and institutions as a part of the LAPSE-RATE campaign, have been submitted to Zenodo (Greene et al., 2020) for free and open access (https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.3737087).
Highlights
Researchers from the University of Oklahoma (OU) joined colleagues from across the world to take part in the Lower Atmospheric Profiling Studies at Elevation – a Remotelypiloted Aircraft Team Experiment (LAPSE-RATE) campaign during 13–19 July 2018 in the San Luis Valley of Colorado
Because the sensors log at different rates to the SD card, the binary files were converted to JavaScript Object Notation (JSON), format and relevant data parameters were interpolated/downsampled to a common 10 Hz time vector in comma-separated value (CSV) format (a1 level)
After converting the raw binary flight log files to CSV format, offsets for each temperature and relative humidity sensor were applied. These offsets were determined in the manner described by Greene et al (2019) and Segales et al (2020a), which involved isolating the CopterSondes’ front Lduct sensor payloads in an environmentally controlled chamber operated by the Oklahoma Mesonet with National Institutes of Standards and Technology (NIST) traceable sensors as references
Summary
Researchers from the University of Oklahoma (OU) joined colleagues from across the world to take part in the Lower Atmospheric Profiling Studies at Elevation – a Remotelypiloted Aircraft Team Experiment (LAPSE-RATE) campaign during 13–19 July 2018 in the San Luis Valley of Colorado. In 2016, these studies expanded to encompass sensor placement and measurement optimization (Greene et al, 2018), system design and evaluation (Segales et al, 2020a), and sensor integration (Greene et al, 2019) due in large part to the CLOUD-MAP project which facilitated the development of RPASs for the explicit purpose of conducting atmospheric measurements (Jacob et al, 2018) The capabilities of these weather-sensing RPASs have been demonstrated in a variety of collaborative field campaigns (de Boer et al, 2019; Jacob et al, 2018; Koch et al, 2018; Kral et al, 2020), calibration and validation experiments (Barbieri et al, 2019), and careful comparison against other remote sensing networks (Bell et al, 2020a). Material outlining the contribution of the other participating institutions can be found in this special issue (Bailey et al, 2020; Bell et al, 2020b; Brus et al, 2020; de Boer et al, 2020c; Pinto et al, 2020)
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