Atmospheric Oxygen and CO2 Concentrations

Example cross-sections of CO2, O2, and APO (O2 + 1.1 * CO2) measured by AO2 (interpolated flight track data) and the Medusa flask sampler (filled circles) during the Pacific southbound flights of ATom-4 in April and May 2018.

ATom: L2 In Situ Measurements from the NCAR Airborne Oxygen Instrument (AO2)

A new dataset provides in situ atmospheric oxygen and carbon dioxide (CO2) concentrations measured by the NCAR Airborne Oxygen Instrument (AO2) during airborne campaigns conducted by NASA's Atmospheric Tomography (ATom) mission. The AO2 Instrument measures O2 concentration using a vacuum-ultraviolet absorption technique.

ATom is a NASA Earth Venture Suborbital-2 mission to study the impact of human-produced air pollution on greenhouse gases and on chemically reactive gases in the atmosphere. ATom deployed an extensive gas and aerosol payload on the NASA DC-8 aircraft for systematic, global-scale sampling of the atmosphere, profiling continuously from 0.2 to 12 km altitude. Around-the-world flights were conducted in each of four seasons between 2016 and 2018. See all ORNL DAAC data from ATom.

Data Citation: Stephens, B.B., E.J. Morgan, A. Watt, J. Bent, S. Afshar, R.F. Keeling, and W. Paplawsky. 2019. ATom: L2 In Situ Measurements from the NCAR Airborne Oxygen Instrument (AO2). ORNL DAAC, Oak Ridge, Tennessee, USA. https://doi.org/10.3334/ORNLDAAC/1704
Data Center: ORNL DAAC
Sponsor: EOSDIS