ATom

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.

The NASA DC-8 aircraft was used for the ATom missions.

The Atmospheric Tomography (ATom) Mission is an Earth Venture Suborbital-2 mission to measure greenhouse gases and human-produced air pollution in remote areas.

The NOAA Single Particle Soot Photometer (SP2) is a laser-induced incandescence instrument primarily used for measuring the black carbon mass content of individual particles.

A NASA DC-8 taxis on the runway at Thule Air Base in Greenland. Credits: NASA/Kent Schiffer

View of the DC-8 cockpit in flight. Credit: NASA/Michael Prather

The ATom aircraft prepares to depart from Punta Arenas in southern Chile on October 14, 2017. During ATom-3, the science team flew over Antarctica and below the ozone hole before continuing on their journey north over the Atlantic Ocean to Greenland and returning to California.

An image of photolysis frequency (J-value) for J-O1D under cloudy conditions from the GSFC GMI model.

Generalized overview of ATom flights. During each of the four campaigns, ATom flights originated from California, flew south over the Pacific Ocean, then north to the western Arctic, southwest to New Zealand, east to Chile and the Atlantic Ocean, north to Greenland, and returned to California across North America. During flights, the aircraft continuously profiled the atmosphere from 0.2 to 12 km altitude.

Circles mark the locations of the 139 selected profiles sampling the remote troposphere. Circle color indicates HCHO column densities integrated over each ATom profile. Data are overlain on global gridded OMI HCHO column densities averaged over the mission. From Wolfe et al. (2019) (see dataset references).