Strategic Priority: Enabling innovative field experiments and measurement campaigns

Mauna Loa Solar Observatory facility

The Mauna Loa Solar Observatory (MLSO) is located at 11,200 feet on the northern flank of Mauna Loa on the island of Hawaii. MLSO was constructed in 1965 by the High Altitude Observatory (HAO), a division of the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR). The Mauna Loa site was chosen for its ideal sky conditions (e.g. dark skies, low water vapor, few cloudy days) that allow observations, on average, about 345 days per year. The original dome houses 3 telescopes that comprise the Advanced Coronal Observing System (ACOS): 1) the PICS telescope to view the solar chromosphere in the neutral emission line of hydrogen known as H (656.3 nm); 2) the CHIP telescope to view the chromosphere in the Helium-I (1083.0 nm) line; and 3) a K-coronameter (MK4) to record the polarization brightness of the low corona. A new dome was constructed in 1997 for the Precision Solar Photometric Telescope (PSPT) that observes the photosphere in the red and blue continuum and the low chromosphere in the CaIIK line. The PSPT is currently operated as a joint venture between HAO and the University of Colorado.

The ACOS instruments provide unique and important observations needed to meet HAO's research goal of understanding the Sun's continuous and dynamic release of magnetized plasma and energy into interplanetary space. These observations are ideally suited for tracking solar activity such as coronal mass ejections (CMEs), erupting prominences and filaments, waves, transient coronal holes and optical flares in the early stages of their formation. They have also provided observations of the evolution of the solar corona and chromosphere over the last 3 solar cycles (11-year activity cycle). The PSPT instrument provides observations needed to understand how variability in solar radiative output relates to magnetic structures such as plages, sunspots, and the solar network. PSPT provides an unprecedented 0.1% pixel-to-pixel photometric precision. Each of the MLSO telescopes records an image of the sun every 3minutes, though higher time resolution has been acquired at specific times to meet community observing campaign needs. A 3rd observer was hired in 2002, which allowed HAO to extend its observing day from 5 to 9.5 hours per day (weather permitting). Examples of MLSO observations are shown below.

MLSO data are provided to the community via the internet. PSPT observations are available at: http://lasp.colorado.edu/pspt_access/. All MLSO ACOS data (3 minute time cadence) acquired since 1980 are available at: http://mlso.hao.ucar.edu. These data are also available from the Virtual Solar Terrestrial Observatory and from the Virtual Solar Observatory at Goddard Space Flight Center. The uniqueness and availability of MLSO data has made it a very important and useful set of observations to the solar-terrestrial community. MLSO observations are used by hundreds of scientists and students worldwide. HAO has put a strong emphasis on keeping the observations at a high quality and providing the data in standard scientific formats for easy usage. HAO is working with the community to integrate the MLSO observations into the latest community software packages (e.g. SolarSoft, Solar Weather Browser, FESTIVAL) for easy data viewing and scientific analysis. In addition, HAO continues to upgrade the MLSO web page using the latest software packages and web tools.

HAO is planning 3 upgrades to the MLSO telescopes over the next 6 months:

1. PSPT: installation of a narrow band CaIIK filter to study the core-to-wing ratio of the Calcium line.
2. MK4 K-Coronameter: Improve the signal-to-noise by a factor of two with the purchase and installation of a new video board and software modifications.
3. Helium-I (CHIP): Record high quality, quantitative Doppler observations.

HAO is working with the University of Hawaii and the University of Michigan to design the next generation of coronal and chromospheric instrumentation, known as the Coronal Solar Magnetism Observatory (COSMO) that will replace the Mauna Loa facility. The recent solar and space physics decadal survey identified the need to measure coronal magnetic fields as one of the greatest observational priorities for solar physics. COSMO is designed to meet this need by acquiring, for the first time, high quality, synoptic observations of coronal and chromospheric magnetic fields. More information about COSMO, including scientific results from prototype instruments, and engineering studies are available at the COSMO web page.

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Community "chemistry" instruments

The CARI Fast-O3 and CO VUV instruments installed on the NCAR/NSF C-130 aircraft in support of the PASE project.

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ACD's CARI group, in collaboration with EOL staff, developed, maintains, and operates several instruments that are available to the community for use on NSF aircraft operated by NCAR. These instruments measure CO, CO2, water vapor, Fast time resolution (5Hz) ozone (Fast-O3), and a 2-channel NO-NOy instrument. These instruments can be requested for a particular campaign as a part of the procedure for requesting the aircraft facility (NSF-LAOF).

CARI supported five field campaigns in FY2007. PANs were measured on the NOAA P-3 aircraft during TexAQS 2006, CO measurements were provided for the Pacific Dust Experiment (PACDEX), flown on the GV; CO and CO2 were measured on the UWY King Air for the Airborne Carbon in the Mountains Experiment (ACME); CO, Water vapor and Fast-Ozone measurements were provided for the Pacific Sulfur Experiment (PASE) flown on the C-130, and the NO-NOy instrument was flown on the WB-57 during the NASA-led TC4 campaign. Please see the ESSL Laboratory Research catalog for details on these campaigns.

Improvements to the airborne CO2 instrument electronics and data acquisition system were implemented in preparation for the ACME-07 campaign. Improved noise specifications and reliability of operation were observed. Additional improvements to the data acquisition are planned and are expected to result in further improved precision and limit of detection.

A project was initiated to characterize the accuracy and precision of several NCAR humidity sensors and our commercial humidity calibration system. This project will culminate in CARI participation in the European intercomparison experiment, AquaVit, in October, 2007 at the AIDA chamber of the Forschung Zentrum Karlsruhe, Germany ( http://imk-aida.fzk.de/campaigns/RH01/Water-Intercomparison-www.htm ). Additionally, this project is conducted in collaboration with the Technical University of Wiesbaden, and will result in a diploma thesis for our visitor, Dennis Kraemer. The CARI group provides the technical and educational oversight and mentoring, TIIMES provides visitor funds, and EOL provides hygrometric equipment and calibration systems.

FY2008 work will include data workup and submission for the missions listed above, data analysis for these projects, continued data analysis from T-REX, MIRAGE, and INTEX-B as well as post-mission calibration efforts for each instrument. Results from TexAQS 2006, MIRAGE, PACDEX, and an instrument paper will be presented at the AGU Fall meeting. Instruments will be reconfigured, calibrated, and prepared for four field deployments during FY2008.

This work is funded by NSF/NCAR wit supplemental funding from NASA for INTEX-B.

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Informatics: Virtual Observatories and Data Services

Figure 1. Comparison of the COSMIC electron density profiles (red lines) near Millstone Hill (42.6N, 71.5W) with contemporaneous measurements by the Haystack Observatory incoherent scatter radar (blue circles and black dots).

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Figure 2. Local time variations of the zonal mean asymmetry index (left panels) and geographic longitudinal variations of the noontime asymmetry index (right panels) for different geomagnetic latitudes calculated from the COSMIC observations (upper panels) and TIE-GCM simulations (lower panels).

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The National Center for Atmospheric Research Earth and Sun Systems High Altitude Observatory (NCAR/ESSL/HAO), the NCAR Computational Information Systems Laboratory Scientific Computing Division (NCAR/CISL/SCD), and McGuinness Associates have been engaged in collaborative work on an NSF-funded project called the Virtual Solar Terrestrial Observatory (VSTO). The VSTO is a distributed, scalable education and research environment for searching, integrating, and analyzing observational, experimental and model databases in the fields of solar, solar-terrestrial and space physics (SSTSP). VSTO comprises a semantically-enabled data framework which provides virtual access to specific SSTSP data, model, tool and material archives containing items from a variety of space- and ground-based instruments and experiments, as well as individual and community modeling and software efforts bridging research and educational use. The VSTO is a fully functional production system addressing a substantial need within two and soon four major SSTSP communities, allowing science projects to advance more rapidly. The overall goal is to integrate a balance of data/model holdings, portals and client software, to the underlying semantically rich, ontology-enabled (for our purpose, an ontology is a machine readable specification of concepts and relations that hold among them) framework, to provide the environment that researchers can use without undue effort as if all the materials were available on their local computers and in a language that is consistent with their field of expertise.

To achieve this goal VSTO must adequately describe the naming conventions (name of a variable, its type, dimensions, etc. or the procedure name and argument list, etc.) and semantics (what the variable physically is, its units, etc. or what the procedure does and returns, etc.) of the datasets and tools, such that this new level of integration and functionality may be realized. VSTO also addresses delivery of data to address the very common situation where users (and data providers) have to deal with the organizational structure of the data sets which varies significantly --- data may be stored at one site in a small number of large files containing a broader spectrum of data while similar data may be stored at another site in a large number of relatively smaller files, each of which may contain less data categories but the smaller files can be (intelligently) assembled together to cover the broader spectrum of data . There is an equally large problem with the range of metadata descriptions for the data. Users often only want subsets of the data and struggle with getting it efficiently. VSTO recognized early that datasets alone are not sufficient to build a virtual observatory. VSTO has both leveraged existing controlled vocabularies and schemas and developed scientific use cases (which are a collection of possible sequences of interactions between the system under discussion and its users (or actors), relating to a particular goal). The collection of use cases defines all system behavior relevant to the actors to assure them that their goals will be carried out properly.

VSTO's success has been unifying (via abstraction of the common concepts, see Fig.) the query workflow across very distinct science disciplines and data-types, decreasing input requirements for query (in one case reducing the number of selections from eight to three), generating only syntactically correct queries (which was not always insurable in previous implementations without semantics), providing semantic query support (by using background ontologies and a reasoner, only exposing coherent queries), and semantic integration (in the past users had to remember and maintain codes to account for numerous different ways to combine and plot the data) via understanding of coordinate systems, relationships, data synthesis, transformations, etc. Lastly, we have found a broader range of potential users (PhD scientists, students, professional research associates and those from outside the fields) are able to access data via VSTO.

Most recently, the VSTO has been adopted in two other virtual observatory projects for data query and access (the Madrigal Virtual Observatory and the Virtual Ionosphere-Thermosphere-Mesosphere Observatory) and its framework has been utilized (without changes in the basic structure but with suitable population of the ontology for the application area) in a scientific data integration project funded by NASA to address interdisciplinary data sources ranging from volcanic eruptions, changes in solar radiation and their atmospheric/ climate response. The upper panel of the figure shows a high-level schematic of the VSTO framework indicating the input ontologies, semantic filters and the reasoning engine which lead to the primary selection via choices of instrument, parameter and date-time supplemented by ancillary metadata (such as the long time records that are common in SSTSP. The output is to generate access to the underlying data, leveraging existing data sources and services. The lower panel shows an example screen view of the VSTO portal where a user has selected to search by parameter, then date, and is led to an instrument choice and thus the underlying data products (both data and plots) which information such as choice of independent variables (here altitude and time) are inferred by the reasoning engine and do not need to be selected by the user.

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Planning of DC3 field program

The nation's most advanced high-altitude research aircraft, the NCAR Gulfstream V (or G-V, formerly referred to as HIAPER), will be used to collect data for the DC3 Field Experiment.

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The Deep Convective Clouds and Chemistry (DC3) Field Experiment will characterize the effect of midlatitude, continental convection on the transport and transformation of ozone and its precursors. Along with measurements of hydrogen oxide radicals, their precursors, and nitrogen oxides in both the inflow and outflow regions of deep convection, measurements of cloud microphysical properties, storm kinematics, and lightning discharges will be conducted. These measurements are planned for three locales in the United States, northeast Colorado, central Oklahoma, and northern Alabama, during May and June 2010 where remote continental regions can be contrasted to anthropogenically-influenced regions.

The Scientific Plan Overview (SPO) and Experimental Design Overview (EDO) documents have been drafted. In doing so, the primary goals of DC3 have been refined to the following:

• To quantify the impact of continental, midlatitude convective storm dynamics, multiphase chemistry, lightning, and cloud microphysics on the transport of atmospheric constituents to the upper troposphere.
• Determine the mass fluxes of air and trace gases into and out of the storm, including entrainment from the boundary layer, mid-troposphere, and stratosphere
• To determine the effects of convectively-perturbed air masses on ozone and its related chemistry in the midlatitude upper troposphere and lower stratosphere near the convective cores and further downwind, 12-48 hours after the near convection region is sampled.
• To contrast the influence of different boundary-layer chemical inputs on the composition of convective outflow.

Ancillary goals of DC3 are to investigate lightning discharge and electrification processes, the water budget, aerosol-cloud particle connections, and halogen chemistry.

The experimental design includes basing the aircraft in either central Oklahoma or Kansas so that the two aircraft can easily ferry to Colorado, Oklahoma or Alabama. Details of the flight plans were developed for the HIAPER G-V aircraft, which will fly in the anvil of the storms measuring storm-processed characteristics of the storm, and for the NASA DC-8, which will measure characteristics of the inflow both below cloud and in the mid-troposphere. The DC3 science team would also welcome the proposed storm-penetrating aircraft (A-10 Warthog) if it is available when DC3 occurs. Ground-based radar and lightning mapping arrays will support the aircraft measurements by sampling kinematic, microphysical, and electrical characteristics of the storms sampled. The DC3 experiment will benefit from both satellite and numerical modeling analysis. Satellite data provide the context of the environment in which the storms form and have been used to show regions of high nitrogen dioxide (NO2), a molecule that is a product of lightning discharges, near thunderstorm activity. Numerical modeling can provide both forecasts of where convection will be occurring and analysis of what processes contribute significantly to the observed constituent concentrations.

Additional information on DC3 may be found at http://utls.tiimes.ucar.edu/Science/dc3.shtml.

FY2008 work will be to submit the SPO and EDO documents to NSF and NASA and to continue planning DC3 with a possible community workshop hosted locally and town meetings held at the annual Fall AGU and AMS meetings. This planning work is funded by NSF/NCAR.

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Planning of START08 field program

Figure 1. This schematic highlights the important processes coupling dynamics, chemistry, and cloud microphysics in the UTLS region. The green line denotes the time average tropopause. The gray line illustrates synoptic scale processes that contribute to stratosphere-troposphere two-way exchange, such as frontal lifting, tropopause folds, and intrusions. In addition, convection brings near-surface pollutants into the upper troposphere, strongly influencing global-scale chemistry. Major transport pathways are indicated by bold arrows. The yellow arrow indicates the dynamical coupling of the tropical UT and extratropical LS by large-scale wave activities. The blue arrow shows the stratospheric intrusions into troposphere near the jet streams. The red arrow represents the upward transport by frontal lifting along the warm conveyor belts. The purple arrow represents the convective transport. In addition, large scale stratospheric circulation contributes to the downward transport.

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The Stratosphere-Troposphere Analyses of Regional Transport (START08) experiment was developed by the NCAR UTLS initiative in collaboration with colleagues from several universities. Using the NSF/NCAR Gulfstream V, also known as HIAPER, the project will study the chemical, microphysical, and transport characteristics of the extratropical upper tropospheric and lower stratospheric (ExUTLS) region. The objective of the experiment is to use in situ chemical, microphysical, and dynamical measurements, satellite data, and models to better understand and characterize the transport pathways in the extratropical tropopause region. Convective transport is one of the pathways we plan to probe. Additional components for the experiment are cirrus clouds near the tropopause and gravity wave generation around jet streams. The experiment is motivated by the need to provide effective observational constraints for the new generation of chemistry-climate models. Satellite observations from several NASA platforms, including HIRDLS on the Aura satellite, and multiscale models from NCAR and collaborating organizations, will be part of this experiment.

The START08 experiment will have a joint payload and operation with the PreHIPPO experiment, where HIPPO stands for The HIAPER Pole-to-Pole Observations of Carbon Cycle and Greenhouse Gases experiment. HIPPO experiment will measure transects of atmospheric constituent concentrations nearly from pole to pole, and from the surface to the tropopause, 4-6 times during different seasons over a 2.5 to 3-year period. The first phase of HIPPO will be operated from Colorado in Spring 2008. The co- principal investigators of START08 are Elliot Atlas (University of Miami), Kenneth Bowman (Texas A&M University) and Laura Pan (NCAR). The principal investigator for HIPPO is Steve Wofsy (Harvard University). The instrumentation and observational component involves collaborations among NCAR, NOAA and university scientists. The flights will be based out of Broomfield, CO and will have two field phases: 21 April to 16 May and 16 to 28 June, 2008.

The START08 experiment will include a number of ESSL and EOL staff as well as external collaborators. In additional to the co-principal investigators, the external collaborators include University of Colorado scientists: Linnea Avallone, Fred Moore, Dale Hurst, Texas A&M University scientist Fuqing Zhang, NOAA Scientist James Elkins. A planning workshop including science highlights will be held at NCAR January 2008.

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