ATom: Aircraft Flight Track and Navigational Data

• Main Authors: WOFSY, S.C., ATom Science Team
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: English
• Published: ORNL Distributed Active Archive Center 2018
• Subjects: Arctic; Greenland; Pacific
• Online Access: https://dx.doi.org/10.3334/ornldaac/1613; https://daac.ornl.gov/cgi-bin/dsviewer.pl?ds_id=1613

This dataset provides flight track and aircraft navigation data from the NASA Atmospheric Tomography Mission (ATom). Flight track information is available for the four ATom campaigns: ATom-1, ATom-2, ATom-3, and ATom-4. Each ATom campaign consists of multiple individual flights and flight navigational information is recorded in 10-second intervals. Data available for each flight includes research flight number, date, and start and stop time of each 10-second interval. In addition, latitude, longitude, altitude, pressure and temperature is included at each 10-second interval. NASA's ATom campaign deploys an extensive gas and aerosol payload on the NASA DC-8 aircraft for systematic, global-scale sampling of the atmosphere, profiling continuously from 0.2 to 12 km altitude. Flights occurred in each of 4 seasons from 2016 to 2018. During each campaign, flights originate from the Armstrong Flight Research Center in Palmdale, California, fly north to the western Arctic, south to the South Pacific, east to the Atlantic, north to Greenland, and return to California across central North America. ATom establishes a single, contiguous, global-scale dataset. One intended use of this flight track data is to facilitate to mapping model results from global models onto the precise ATom flight tracks for comparison.