The 2014–2015 Polar Winds DAWN Airborne Campaigns; Instrument Performance, Data Collection and Advanced Data Processing Algorithm Development

During Oct-Nov 2014 and May 2015, NASA sponsored two airborne missions designed to fly the Doppler Aerosol WiNd (DAWN) lidar to take wind measurements of the Arctic atmosphere, specifically over and off the coasts of Greenland. Campaign I was based in Kangerlussuaq, Greenland and flew DAWN on board the NASA King Air UC-12B aircraft while Campaign II was based in Keflavik, Iceland and utilized the NASA DC-8 aircraft to fly DAWN and Dropsondes over the Arctic. More than 20 mission were flown and 100 hours of lidar data were obtained during the two campaigns along with ~100 dropsondes launched during the May campaign.

 This presentation will focus on the scanning strategies, operational data collection and instrument related performance of DAWN in the polar regions and plans for improvements for future missions. In addition, we will report on the development of several advanced post-experiment data processing algorithms for ground velocity removal, supervised search and adaptive integration which have increased the value and accuracy of the DAWN data. Comparisons between the processed DAWN data and dropsondes were undertaken and have shown a very high similarity in the two wind measurements. The results of these comparisons and the accuracy of DAWN will be presented and discussed for the campaigns as a whole and for several case studies.