ACTIVATE 6th Deployment Announcement

May 6, 2022, 9:56 a.m.

Project: ACTIVATE

In May 2022, the Aerosol Cloud meTeorology Interactions oVer the western ATlantic Experiment (ACTIVATE) returned to operations for a summer 2022 deployment. This deployment is part of a 5-year project (2019-2023, with the campaign portion from 2020-2022) to investigate the atmospheric impacts of marine boundary layer clouds. These clouds cover over 45% of the Earth’s Ocean surface and exert a net cooling effect; thus, these clouds play a critical role in the Earth’s energy balance and water cycle. ACTIVATE seeks to improve the basic understanding of aerosol-cloud-meteorology interactions, which in-turn will enrich knowledge of atmospheric composition, Earth’s water and energy cycle, climate variability and change, and weather. ACTIVATE is a broad collaborative project, led by scientists from University of Arizona and NASA Langley Research Center, including participants from the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, the National Institute of Aerospace, Brookhaven National Laboratory, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, the National Center for Atmospheric Research, the University of Miami, and the German Aerospace Center (DLR). The ACTIVATE deployment is based out of NASA Langley Research Center with the primary sampling region being over the Western North Atlantic Ocean. Two aircraft, the King Air and Falcon, are used in a coordinated remote sensing and in-situ sampling process.

The summer 2022 deployment is the sixth ACTIVATE deployment, building upon nearly 150 research flights with ~970 flight hours between the two aircrafts, which were conducted in three winter and two summer deployments in 2020-2022. This campaign collects information on trace gases, meteorological state parameters, cloud properties, aerosol properties, atmospheric profiling, and aircraft parameters. Flights will be conducted in May 2022 until the end of June 2022. These measurements will add more summertime cases to better understand gradients in the aerosol-cloud system during the transition between cloud types and the solid versus broken cloud fields.

The ASDC provides all currently available publication-quality data for the earlier deployments of ACTIVATE. Data products for this campaign should be available by the end of 2022/early 2023. To date, ACTIVATE researchers have generated over 30 peer-reviewed publications.

More information about ACTIVATE can be obtained from the ASDC’s Data in Action: “Advancing Aerosol-Cloud-Meteorology Knowledge through ACTIVATE.” This resource includes information about ACTIVATE’s scientific background and objectives, instruments/platforms used, major events, major findings, and related publications. Visit the ACTIVATE website for up-to-date news and information about the field campaign.


Related URLS: https://asdc.larc.nasa.gov/project/ACTIVATE