Airborne Arctic Stratospheric Expedition (AASE)

This CD-ROM contains data from the Airborne Arctic Stratospheric Expedition (AASE) which was based in Stavanger, Norway during January and February, 1989. The expedition was designed to study the production and loss mechanisms of ozone in the north polar stratospheric environment, and the effect on ozone distribution of the Arctic polar vortex and of the cold temperatures associated with the formation of Polar Stratospheric Clouds (PSC).

The data consists of measurements of chemical and dynamical parameters collected onboard the NASA ER-2 and DC-8 aircraft (for example, ClO, BrO, HCl, O₃, NO_x, N₂O, HNO₃ and CH₄, whole air samples and aerosol measurements). In addition, there are ozonesonde soundings from three stations (Angmagssalik and Scoresbysund, Greenland, and Lerwick, U.K.), aerosol and temperature profiles from the SAM II satellite, global grid point values of Nimbus 7 TOMS ozone, and selected radiosonde soundings from stations in the region of the experiment. The mission used similar instrumentation to that which was deployed during the Airborne Antarctic Ozone Experiment (AAOE) in 1987.

Theory teams provided calculations of: potential vorticity along the ER-2 flight path; cross-sections of potential vorticity, temperature, and geopotential heights along the DC-8 flight path; cross-sections of Cl_x, F_x, HCl, HNO₃, and NO_y along the DC-8 flight path; global grid point values of temperature, geopotential heights, and horizontal winds on selected pressure surfaces; northern hemispheric grid point values of potential vorticity and pressure on selected potential temperature surfaces.

This dataset is public and can be accessed from the BADC archives

The data are held on CD-ROM at the BADC and are available for browsing purposes. If you want to use the data in earnest you should order a copy of the CD from one of the contact addresses listed below.

All files within this release are standard MS-DOS ASCII files with variable length records. In general, the file naming convention uses a two character prefix to identify the measurement, followed by a six digit number giving the year, month, and day (GMT) of the flight (or balloon launch). To identify the measurement platform, a three character name as in ER2, DC8, or Bhh is used to denote the data is from the ER-2, DC-8, or balloon (hh denotes the GMT hour of launch).

The documentation on the CD-ROM has been extracted and made available through this WWW interface. This gives an outline of the campaign, an inventory of the data on the CD and a detailed description of the data format.

There is a special issue of Geophysics Research Letters (Volume 17, number 4 - March 1990 supplement) devoted to the AASE campaign. A paper by Turco et al. in that issue contains an overview of the mission and its objectives. We also provide a list of other references.

National Aeronautics and Space Administration, [Gaines, S.; Hipskind, S.;Anderson, J.; Browell, E.; Carroll, M.A.; Chan, K.R.; Coffey, M.; Fahey, D.; Ferry, G.; Gandrud, B.; Gary, B.; Gregory, G.; Hathaway, P.; Heidt, L.; Hubler, G.; Kelly, K.; Krueger, A.; Lowenstein, M.; Mankin, B.; McCormick, P.; McElroy, M.; Poole, L.; Proffitt, M.; Rood, R.; Schoeberl, M.; Stolarski, R.; Toon, G.; Torres, A.; Vedder, J.; Wahner, A.; Wilson, C.; Wofsy, S.] . Airborne Arctic Stratospheric Expedition (AASE), [Internet]. National Aeronautics and Space Administration, 1990, Date of citation. Available from http://badc.nerc.ac.uk/view/badc.nerc.ac.uk__ATOM__dataent_AASE

If you would like to obtain a copy of the CD-ROM you should contact Steven Gaines or Steve Hipskind at the NASA Ames Research Center.