CaltechAUTHORS
Published March 2022 | Version Published
Journal Article Open

The NASA Atmospheric Tomography (ATom) Mission: Imaging the Chemistry of the Global Atmosphere

Creators

  • 1. ROR icon Harvard University
  • 2. ROR icon University of California, Irvine
  • 3. ROR icon Goddard Space Flight Center
  • 4. ROR icon National Center for Atmospheric Research
  • 5. ROR icon Pennsylvania State University
  • 6. ROR icon California Institute of Technology
  • 7. ROR icon Ames Research Center
  • 8. ROR icon University of Colorado Boulder
  • 9. ROR icon Columbia University
  • 10. ROR icon University of New Hampshire
  • 11. ROR icon Langley Research Center
  • 12. ROR icon University of Vienna
  • 13. ROR icon Earth System Research Laboratory
  • 14. ROR icon Georgia Institute of Technology
  • 15. ROR icon Scripps Institution of Oceanography
  • 16. ROR icon University of Rochester

Abstract

This article provides an overview of the NASA Atmospheric Tomography (ATom) mission and a summary of selected scientific findings to date. ATom was an airborne measurements and modeling campaign aimed at characterizing the composition and chemistry of the troposphere over the most remote regions of the Pacific, Southern, Atlantic, and Arctic Oceans, and examining the impact of anthropogenic and natural emissions on a global scale. These remote regions dominate global chemical reactivity and are exceptionally important for global air quality and climate. ATom data provide the in situ measurements needed to understand the range of chemical species and their reactions, and to test satellite remote sensing observations and global models over large regions of the remote atmosphere. Lack of data in these regions, particularly over the oceans, has limited our understanding of how atmospheric composition is changing in response to shifting anthropogenic emissions and physical climate change. ATom was designed as a global-scale tomographic sampling mission with extensive geographic and seasonal coverage, tropospheric vertical profiling, and detailed speciation of reactive compounds and pollution tracers. ATom flew the NASA DC-8 research aircraft over four seasons to collect a comprehensive suite of measurements of gases, aerosols, and radical species from the remote troposphere and lower stratosphere on four global circuits from 2016 to 2018. Flights maintained near-continuous vertical profiling of 0.15–13-km altitudes on long meridional transects of the Pacific and Atlantic Ocean basins. Analysis and modeling of ATom data have led to the significant early findings highlighted here.

Copyright and License

© 2022 American Meteorological Society.

Acknowledgement

This work is a contribution to the ATom project, an EVS-2 Investigation awarded under NASA Research Announcement (NRA) NNH13ZDA001N-EVS2, Research Opportunities in Space and Earth Science (ROSES-2013) and funded through NASA Agreement NNH15AB12I to NOAA. The National Center for Atmospheric Research is a major facility sponsored by the National Science Foundation under Cooperative Agreement 1852977. The AO2 and Medusa measurements were supported by NSF Awards AGS-1547626, AGS-1547797, AGS-1623745, and AGS-1623748. We acknowledge the many scientists and engineers on the ATom Science Team who contributed their talent, time, and expertise to this mission. We also gratefully acknowledge the NASA and ESPO project managers, site managers, shipping coordinators, mission managers, pilots, aircrew, and ground crew that were essential for the success of this extraordinarily challenging campaign. A full list of the ATom team members can be found in Table ES5 in the online supplemental material. We thank Dennis Dickerson (Respond Grafiks, Broomfield, Colorado) for creating a digital rendering of the NASA DC-8 that was used in Fig. 1 of this article. We thank the many service and hospitality workers in Palmdale, Anchorage, Kona, Pago Pago, Nadi, Christchurch, Punta Arenas, Recife, Ascension Island, Cabo Verde, Lajes, Kangerlussuaq, Thule, Bangor, and Minneapolis who welcomed a large group of tired scientists and crew with warm beds, good food, heroic patience, and flexibility for our changeable schedules.

Data Availability

All data from the Atmospheric Tomography mission are openly available and archived in the Oak Ridge National Laboratory Distributed Active Archive Center (ORNL DAAC) at https://doi.org/10.3334/ORNLDAAC/1925.

Supplemental Material

Supplemental Materials (PDF 6.08 MB)

Files

bams-BAMS-D-20-0315.1.pdf

Files (91.6 MB)

Name Size Download all
md5:3c5b37af075c4354da52c8dde82ef977
6.4 MB Preview Download
md5:64b8b50c391e74d7323bf9ce7c2590bf
85.2 MB Preview Download

Additional details

Related works

Is supplemented by
Dataset: 10.3334/ORNLDAAC/1925 (DOI)

Funding

National Aeronautics and Space Administration
NNH13ZDA001N-EVS2
National Aeronautics and Space Administration
NNH15AB12I
National Science Foundation
AGS-1852977
National Science Foundation
AGS-1547626
National Science Foundation
AGS-1547797
National Science Foundation
AGS-1623745
National Science Foundation
AGS-1623748

Dates

Accepted
2021-09-30
Available
2022-03-10
Published online

Caltech Custom Metadata

Caltech groups
Division of Geological and Planetary Sciences (GPS), Division of Engineering and Applied Science (EAS)
Publication Status
Published