ATom: Measurements of Soluble Acidic Gases and Aerosols (SAGA)
A new dataset from the Atmospheric Tomography Mission (ATom) provides measurements from the soluble acidic gases and aerosols (SAGA) instrument. These data quantify pollutants such as nitric acid and aerosols that are signatures of biomass burning including wildfires. Data were collected with two related installations: a mist chamber/ion chromatography (MC/IC) system and a paired bulk aerosol system. As the aircraft profiled the atmosphere, the MC/IC system measured in situ atmospheric distributions of nitric acid (plus < 1 um NO3 aerosol) and fine (< 1 um) aerosol sulfate at an approximately 80-second interval. The paired bulk aerosol system collects particulates onto filters for subsequent analysis. At the lab, collected filters were first extracted with water to obtain the water-soluble (WS) constituents and then extracted again using methanol to collect the methanol soluble (MS) fraction. Ion chromatography on aqueous extracts of the bulk aerosol samples were used to quantify soluble ions (Cl-, Br-, NO3-, SO42-, C2O42-, Na+, NH4+, K+, Ca+, and Mg+). The SAGA system is provided by the University of New Hampshire (UNH).
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: Dibb, J.E. 2019. ATom: Measurements of Soluble Acidic Gases and Aerosols (SAGA). ORNL DAAC, Oak Ridge, Tennessee, USA. https://doi.org/10.3334/ORNLDAAC/1748