AGAP: an atmospheric gondola for aerosol profiling

A novel airborne gondola was developed to profile the Arctic boundary layer exploiting a tethered balloon system. A number of aerosol instrumentations were customized and deployed in the gondola for two test campaigns conducted in Ny-Ålesund in September 2014 and April–May 2015. The performances of...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Rendiconti Lincei
Main Authors: Mazzola, Mauro, Busetto, Maurizio, Ferrero, Luca, Viola, Angelo Pietro, CAPPELLETTI, David Michele
Other Authors: Cappelletti, David Michele
Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
Language:English
Published: 2016
Subjects:
Online Access:http://hdl.handle.net/11391/1387955
https://doi.org/10.1007/s12210-016-0514-x
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Summary:A novel airborne gondola was developed to profile the Arctic boundary layer exploiting a tethered balloon system. A number of aerosol instrumentations were customized and deployed in the gondola for two test campaigns conducted in Ny-Ålesund in September 2014 and April–May 2015. The performances of the instrumental setup have been characterized and will be described in the present paper. An illustration of the main results and a discussion of the main phenomenology will be also presented. Briefly, the tethered balloon systems demonstrates the capability of successfully lifting up to 15 kg of scientific payload, featuring a power autonomy of about 3 h of continuous measurements with one battery. We demonstrate for the first time on a tethered balloon the capability of measuring at the same time aerosol light scattering, absorption coefficients and size distribution, which is very promising for deducing the aerosol optical properties as a function of height along the probed atmospheric column.