NASA’s Contributions to the 2021 Aeolus Field Campaign: CPEX-AW

In 2020, a joint NASA-ESA campaign focusing on the tropics was planned to take place in Cabo Verde. This campaign, now delayed to 2021, was designed to engage the broader scientific atmospheric dynamics community and to assist in calibrating and validating the recently launched ESA Aeolus wind lidar satellite system. This campaign is an opportunity to join the U.S. and European airborne wind lidar system teams addressing the Aeolus calibration and validation. Nominally, the NASA contribution is a follow-on to the Convective Processes Experiment (CPEX) field campaign which took place in 2017 (https://cpex.jpl.nasa.gov/). The 2021 field campaign will add an aerosol (A) and winds (W) component—CPEX-AW—and will provide opportunities to study the dynamics and microphysics related to the Saharan air layer, African easterly waves and jets, the marine atmospheric boundary layer, and convection that not only advance our understanding of tropical dynamics but also improve weather forecasts. The NASA component of the field campaign plans to begin intensive operations in early July 2021 and will continue until mid-August. Approximately 150 flight hours are planned on NASA’s DC-8 aircraft. Planned instruments are the Doppler Aerosol WiNd Lidar (DAWN), the High Altitude Lidar Observatory (HALO), the APR-3 radar (Ku, Ka, and W bands), the High Altitude Monolithic Microwave integrated Circuit (MMIC) Sounding Radiometer (HAMSR), and dropsondes. During Summer 2020, NASA’s team hosted a dry run of a simulated field campaign which included virtual flights. In this talk, we will discuss the plans for NASAs contributions to the 2021 Aeolus Field Campaign and present preliminary findings from using Aeolus data and CPEX-AW dry-run virtual flights.