SAIL Aerosol Vertical Profiles (SAIL-AVP) Field Campaign Report

Technical Report · Fri Dec 01 04:00:00 EST 2023

DOI:https://doi.org/10.2172/2280813· OSTI ID:2280813

Aiken, Allison C. ^[1]; Feldman, Daniel ^[2]; DeMott, Paul ^[3]; Creamean, Jessie ^[3]; Smith, James ^[4]; Fan, Jiwen ^[5]; Christensen, John ^[2]; Bouskill, Nicholas ^[2]; Dong, Wenming ^[2]; Dexheimer, Darielle ^[6]; China, Swarup ^[7]; Cheng, Zezhen ^[7]; Vandergrift, Gregory ^[7]

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1. Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL), Los Alamos, NM (United States)
2. Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL), Berkeley, CA (United States)
3. Colorado State Univ., Fort Collins, CO (United States)
4. Univ. of California, Irvine, CA (United States)
5. Argonne National Laboratory (ANL), Argonne, IL (United States)
6. Sandia National Lab. (SNL-NM), Albuquerque, NM (United States)
7. Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL), Richland, WA (United States)

Aerosols are central to understanding the water cycle within mountainous regions, but a complete understanding of this role cannot be provided without vertically resolved observations, particularly for aerosol-cloud interactions, since we simultaneously need to know aerosol information and meteorology near cloud bases. The goal of SAIL Aerosol Vertical Profiles (SAIL-AVP) was to perform tethered balloon system (TBS) measurements during different seasons to elucidate process-level understanding of the aerosols and associated meteorological conditions within complex mountainous terrain. Measurements were conducted during the deployment of the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Atmospheric Radiation Measurement (ARM) user facility’s second Mobile Facility (AMF2) as part of the Surface Atmosphere Integrated Field Laboratory (SAIL) campaign in the East River Watershed of the Upper Colorado River Basin (UCRB) in southwestern Colorado. In mid-latitude continental interior mountain ranges, and especially at SAIL, aerosol vertical profiles and their relationships with meteorology are, almost without exception, inferred from a combination of ground-based and remote-sensing data. These flights provided many more dimensions to aerosol-cloud interactions that are unavailable to those inferential approaches: the TBS collected in situ information in the vertical, optical, chemical, and biological dimensions for aerosol-cloud interactions. Furthermore, the collocation of these flights with longstanding collaborative resources in the region, including the ongoing surface and subsurface hydrologic observations from the DOE’s Watershed Function Science Focus Area (SFA), produced a unique set of atmospheric observations that are complemented by existing land-surface and subsurface (e.g., groundwater) observations.

• Research Organization: Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), Oak Ridge, TN (United States). Atmospheric Radiation Measurement (ARM) Data Center
• Sponsoring Organization: USDOE Office of Science (SC), Biological and Environmental Research (BER)
• Contributing Organization: Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL); Brookhaven National Laboratory (BNL); Argonne National Laboratory (ANL); Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL)
• DOE Contract Number: AC06-76RL01830
• OSTI ID: 2280813
• Report Number(s): DOE/SC-ARM--23-049
• Country of Publication: United States
• Language: English

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