Commane Group

ATom-2 RF10    19 February 2017    Thule - Anchorage

Our tenth research flight travelled across the northern edge of the globe from Thule Air Force Base, Greenland to Anchorage, Alaska via 82oN. 

This was my first trip to Thule and is the furthest north I’ve ever been (on the ground anyway) at 76oN. The air temperature was a brisk -25oC (-30oC with the wind chill) when we arrived. I always turn bright pink in cold like this and no matter how well I try to protect my face, it doesn’t seem to help! But when dusk arrived, the wind picked up and the temperature was biting on my eyes as we left the dining hall. 

We arrived just after noon and saw a little sliver of sunlight on the ground. It turns out this was the first direct sunlight the town has seen all year! This means a “first light” party with full costumes! Unfortunately, with a 4am start to leave Lajes on time, I was fast asleep in bed by 9pm Thule time (or midnight Lajes time) and missed the party. I was feeling bad/old until I heard that the more junior graduate students didn’t make it either :)

I was really surprised by Thule. The food was great and the rooms were cosy and one particular highlight was free laundry! I had a load of washing in the machine within 5 minutes of getting to my room. It was desperately needed too! I hadn’t washed any clothes since Christchurch and my reserves were pretty low. 

I even got to see the three (one white and two black) resident arctic foxes, who were very well fed little balls of fluff! They weren’t afraid of people but kept a respectable distance to still be considered ‘wildlife'.

We started pre-flight at a nice leisurely 9.30am and left Thule a little after noon (you can almost see the sun!). We then chased the sun west across the Arctic ocean to Alaska.

On our flight, we flew north out of Thule to 82oN and across northern Canada to Alaska where we did missed approaches over Utqiagvik (Barrow), Deadhorse and Fairbanks before landing in Anchorage. 

On this and especially on our next flight leaving Thule to fly across northern Canada to Alaska, we saw the highest levels of pollution (besides the African fires) of the entire of ATom2. CO₂, CH₄, and CO were all really high in layers right down at the surface and there was a lot of sulfur in this air too. And some of the pollution extended right up to the top of the troposphere. In contrast, on ATom1, when we didn’t fly over northern Canada, we saw fires from Siberia just north of Alaska, but the constant summer sunshine there was no cold dome then.

We also saw a lot of thin broken sea ice as we flew along. Translucent layers of ice were forming over the open water areas we saw when we flew over on January 29th. The 2016/2017 winter saw the lowest sea ice ever observed by satellite and it’s scary to see it in person… 

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Updates from the field will be made on Twitter by various people (search for #NASA_ATom or just click here for a full overview: #NASA_ATom

ATom-2 RF08    15 February 2017    Ascension - Lajes

Our eighth research flight travelled north again from Ascension to Lajes on the island of Terceira, the easternmost island of the Azores. 

This was our second trip to Ascension and things seemed a lot more familiar, including the warm welcome from the base commander. We knew to expect basic but clean housing on the American Air Force base and we were pleasantly surprised to find a low bandwith wifi set up for us. But the meal schedule still took a bit of getting used to: 4pm dinner seemed a little too soon after 11am lunch! 

Our wild donkey and wild sheep friends were around but no sign of any land crabs this time anywhere except on the runway on the afternoon before flight!

After working on the aircraft in the morning, we took some time to hike around Green Mountain, the highest point on the island. At low heights near the water, Ascension is like Mars: there are volcanic rocks and clinka (bits of broken off volcanic rocks) everywhere but no vegetation. It’s hot and extremely dry but the beaches are spectacular! Inland a little, clouds from the Atlantic collide with the mountains to create what’s called orographic precipitation: the mountains cause rain! When the island was discovered by the British, an experiment was started to grow all kinds of crops. This makes for a very interesting contrast where banana groves, concede to grass and then rock as you look down to the sea.

While I failed to see any penguins, I did get to see a giant green turtle lay her eggs on the beach in Ascension! Obviously taking a photo of that at night didn’t work but the beaches were covered in turtle tracks and nests which we saw when going down to the beach for sunset! When we were here in August, the beach was pretty smooth and there were no nests anywhere! If we had landed a day or two earlier, we may have been able to see the turtle hatchlings emerging from the nests at full moon!

As well as having a wonderful stop in Ascension, we also had a very interesting flight up the middle of the Atlantic to Lajes! 

Just after leaving Ascension we encountered very fresh pollution from African fires with over 400 ppb of CO (highest we’ve ever measured in flight!). There was dust and fire emissions mixed in together and we sampled this pollution at various altitudes for the first 3 hours of our flight. The chemical forecast from colleagues at NASA Goddard indicated that we would see it but predicted much lower concentrations than we observed. Working out why we had such large differences will be an interesting research question. 

After crossing the ICTZ again background concentrations of lots of species increased again just in a mirror image of what we saw going south between Kona and Fiji.

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Updates from the field will be made on Twitter by various people (search for #NASA_ATom or just click here for a full overview: #NASA_ATom

ATom-2 RF06    10 February 2017    Christchurch - Punta Arenas

Our sixth research flight travelled back in time from Christchurch, New Zealand to Punta Arenas, Chile! We left Christchurch at 8am on the morning of February 11th  and arrived in Punta Arenas at 2am on the morning of February 11th. Between time zone changes and flying east at high latitudes, we gained back the day we lost arriving in Fiji. 

We had originally planned to leave CHC on Feb 10th but strong cross winds made landing in Punta Arenas a risk the pilots weren’t allowed to take. So 90 minutes before take off, we scrubbed our first flight on ATom and trudged back to the hotel. We have been very lucky that no flight was delayed during ATom1 and Christchurch was a nice please to be delayed for a day this time. 

On this flight we saw a faint but persistent signal of African fires throughout the troposphere. We sampled up into the stratosphere too. Except for some CO2 drawdown over the ocean, this flight was quite similar to the southern flight on ATom1. 

The southern most point of our flight over the southern ocean was successfully spent looking for icebergs when not sampling the stratosphere. This photo was taken by Eric Ray, NOAA. 

Overall we had a great flight and the 2am landing, 3.30am hotel breakfast, 5am bed, wasn’t as difficult as last time! 

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Updates from the field will be made on Twitter by various people (search for #NASA_ATom or just click here for a full overview: #NASA_ATom.

ATom-2 RF04    03 February 2017    Kona - Nadi

Our fourth research flight brought us from to Kona, Hawaii to Nadi, Fiji across both the equator and over the international date line a number of times. As we departed from Kona, the winds were picking up and the volcanic smog (vog) was beginning to lift from over the island. 

We crossed the chemical equator at about 2oN when all the long lived gas species dropped. The southern hemisphere is a much smaller source of most human emitted gases and mixing between the northern and southern hemisphere is slow so concentrations of many trace gases are smaller: CO went from background values of about 80 ppb to less than 50 ppb, while CO2, CH4, O3, NOy all dropped at the same time.

We had to modify our planned flight track as large scale weather systems spang up as we completed our flight. Meteorologist Eric Ray was on hand to advise our navigator Steve to allow us to replot our course. Here Steve Wofsy and Eric Ray (Mission Science) pose with an RF04 poster.

When we landed in beautiful and green Fiji, we rented cars to bring us to the hotel. It was good to be back driving on the ‘correct’ side of the road although getting back into left hand drive thinking took a little time after 9+ hours of flying. 

We spent the morning of our day in Fiji at the aircraft preparing for RF05 the next day but that left us a little time to get groceries. And an epic volley ball game developed between scientists and crew before dinner while I lounged in the shade of the pool (I’m too short to be useful at volleyball!). The only winner from that game seemed to be the sun who managed to claim a few sunburn victims. 

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Updates from the field will be made on Twitter by various people (search for #NASA_ATom or just click here for a full overview: #NASA_ATom.