The Atmospheric Tomography Missions’s Deployments, Flights, Meteorology, and Measurements

The Atmospheric Tomography Mission (ATom) is a NASA Earth Venture Suborbital mission that is designed to take representative samples of the Earth’s chemistry in the four seasons in both hemispheres using the NASA DC-8 aircraft. The ATom DC-8 payload (23 instruments) provides hundreds of atmospheric species that show how emissions affect the reactivity of the global atmosphere. Each of the deployments is composed of a series of flights that are basically transects from the Arctic to the Antarctic down the central Pacific, with a return transect up the center of the Atlantic. Between the airfields deployment sites, the DC-8 performs deep profiles of the atmosphere from an altitude of ~12 km down to 200 m in the boundary layer. Each flight series includes a broad sampling of meteorological conditions. For example, the ATom-1 deployment in August 2016 covered the Arctic summer, across the inter-tropical convergence zone and the South Pacific convergence zone, to the Antarctic winter. In this talk, we will show the flights from the ATom-1 (10 flights), -2 (11 flights), and -3 (11 flights) deployments, and discuss the basic meteorology of those flights.