Field Campaigns

The main service we offer to support field campaigns is running our tropospheric model p-TOMCAT in near real-time. This gives 3D chemical fields for the recent past. We then produce output from the model that can be used in two ways. We can produce automatically plots of the region of interest. These are used for flight planning or for helping interpret observations while the field campaign is still under way.

We can also combine these model results with back trajectories calculated by other groups to provide forecasts for a limited area. Some of the aircraft campaigns we have been involved in include ACTO, EXPORT, ITOP and ADRIEX. We also provided near real-time model output for the Mace Head based NAMBLEX experiment. Additionally we have provided back trajectories for some previous campaigns.

Another part of the work we do is participating in post-mission analysis of observations when we have funding for such work. We use measurements to look at issues such as regional ozone budgets, long range transport of pollution and large scale transport processes such as warm conveyor belts. See for example O'Connor et al. Tropospheric ozone budget: regional and global calculations. Atmos. Chem. Phys. Discuss., 4, 991-1036, 2004.

Contact : Dr Nick Savage (Nick.Savage@atm.ch.cam.ac.uk)

The figure shows p-TOMCAT CO field produced to assist flight planning for the ADRIEX campaign.