Abstract
Abstract. In July 2018, the International Society for Atmospheric Research using Remotely piloted Aircraft (ISARRA) hosted a flight week to showcase the role remotely piloted aircraft systems (RPASs) can have in filling the atmospheric data gap. This campaign was called Lower Atmospheric Process Studies at Elevation – a Remotely-piloted Aircraft Team Experiment (LAPSE-RATE). In support of this campaign, ground-based remote and in situ systems were also deployed for the campaign. The University of Oklahoma deployed the Collaborative Lower Atmospheric Mobile Profiling System (CLAMPS), the University of Colorado deployed two Doppler wind lidars, and the National Severe Storms Laboratory deployed a mobile mesonet with the ability to launch radiosondes. This paper focuses on the data products from these instruments that result in profiles of the atmospheric state. The data are publicly available in the Zenodo LAPSE-RATE community portal (https://zenodo.org/communities/lapse-rate/, 19 January 2021). The profile data discussed are available at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.3780623 (Bell and Klein, 2020), https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.3780593 (Bell et al., 2020b), https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.3727224 (Bell et al., 2020a), https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.3738175 (Waugh, 2020b), https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.3720444 (Waugh, 2020a), and https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.3698228 (Lundquist et al., 2020).
Highlights
The atmospheric boundary layer (ABL) is undersampled by traditional meteorological sampling techniques
Collaborative Lower Atmospheric Mobile Profiling System (CLAMPS) and the CU Doppler wind lidars (DLs) could act to provide data on the background flow and thermodynamics, while the remotely piloted aircraft systems (RPASs) scattered throughout the valley were able to provide hyper-local observations more sensitive to the varying boundary layer conditions affected by the terrain
In order to fulfill the need for more observations of the ABL, a large group of scientists deployed multiple types of boundary-layer profiling systems in the San Luis Valley in southern Colorado to evaluate the current capabilities of these systems
Summary
The atmospheric boundary layer (ABL) is undersampled by traditional meteorological sampling techniques (e.g., radiosondes or tall towers; National Research Council, 2009; National Academies of Sciences and Medicine, 2018). Ground-based systems like Doppler wind lidars (DLs), the Atmospheric Emitted Radiance Interferometer (AERI), and microwave radiometers (MWRs) can fill in observational gaps that occur with traditional weather observations, such as radiosondes and meteorological towers While useful, these remote-sensing observations still suffer from certain drawbacks, including limited range and operating condition restrictions. In order to demonstrate the effectiveness of RPASs in ABL observation, the International Society for Atmospheric Research using Remotely piloted Aircraft (ISARRA) organized a field campaign called Lower Atmospheric Process Studies at Elevation – a Remotely-piloted Aircraft Team Experiment (LAPSE-RATE) in the San Luis Valley in south-central Colorado (de Boer et al, 2020a, b) from 15 to 20 July 2018 In support of this campaign, the University of Oklahoma (OU), the NOAA National Severe Storms Laboratory (NSSL), and the University of Colorado (CU) deployed remote sensors and launched radiosondes to supplement and enhance the data collected by RPASs deployed in the valley. The paper is structured as follows: Sect. 2 describes the platforms deployed by OU, NSSL, and CU; Sect. 3 describes the locations of the various platforms; Sect. 4 describes the post-processing applied to the data; and Sect. 5 shows sample data from each system
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