Met Office - Met. Research Flight

Introduction

The Met. Research Flight (MRF) was a Met Office facility, which operated a well instrumented C-130 Hercules (also referred to as Mk.2 Hercules) aircraft for research purposes. The C-130 was in service from 1972 to 2001 and flew over 1800 research sorties. The large capacity and long endurance of this platform made it ideal for atmospheric research in the areas of cloud physics, atmospheric radiation, atmospheric chemistry, satellite activities, mesoscale meteorology and boundary layer studies.

Flight time was made available to the UK academic community through the NERC Airborne Research Support Facility. The BADC holds data from NERC funded flights, such as those made during ACSOE and UTLS. The basic set of measurements included ozone, nitrogen oxides, water vapour, aerosols, wind, position and temperature. These were often supplemented by project specific measurements.

The aircraft was able to operate scientifically throughout the troposphere from a minimum altitude of 15 m (50 ft) where permitted, up to a maximum of 10 km. The aircraft had a maximum working flight time of 12 hours.

The C-130 was taken out of service in March 2001 and a new joint NERC-Met Office Facility for Airborne Aircraft Measurements (FAAM) was established operating a BAe-146-301 aircraft.

Restricted Data Access

There are three types of restrictions on the MRF data.

Data which is solely the property of the Met Office. The Met Office wish to monitor the use of this data and require an acknowledgement of the data source if they are used in any publication. For these reasons we do not make the data available to anonymous users through these WWW pages.
In order to gain access to the Met Office MRF data held at the BADC, please apply for access to the Met Office Research Flights data . Please note that the Met Office data sets are available for bona fide academic research only, on a per person per project basis (i.e. all members on a same project who will be using the data must individually apply for access to the data).
Flights paid for by NERC progammes are only accessible to people participating in that programme. Each of these programmes have its own conditions of use to sign (e.g. UTLS)
After a period of a few years flights paid for by NERC programmes become publicly available. They can then be downloaded anonymously via the Web or using FTP.

Your application for accessing the MRF data will be processed within a day of receipt. Provided your application is complete and fully meets the conditions of use, a web account will be activated to allow you access to the Met Office MRF directories via your login account from the BADC WWW Browse Archive pages.

Data File Format

The MRF data are stored in a proprietary binary format. IDL software to read the data is available.

The file names are common to all flights.

Documentation

Instrument details and capabilities are given in the Summary of Capability document produced by the Met Office. A summary of the aircraft and instrumentation characteristics is also available. Some flights have scanned copies of the flight folder included in the data directories.

Links to Further Information and Related Sites

Joint Met Office - NERC Facility for Airborne Aircraft Measuremnets (FAAM) – BAe-146-301 aircraft
Joint NERC-DLR Airborne Remote Sensing Facility (ARSF) – Dornier 228-101 aircraft (Do 228)

Citation

Date of citation

Who to Contact

If you have queries about these pages or about obtaining the MRF data from the BADC then you should contact BADC Support. Your query should be answered within one working day. When follow-up work is required, the BADC support will carry out the work as quickly and efficiently as possible, and in any case, the user will be kept informed of progress.

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