Atmospheric Carbon and Transport - America (ACT-America) Data Sets: Description, Management, and Delivery.

The ACT-America project is a NASA Earth Venture Suborbital-2 mission designed to study the transport and fluxes of greenhouse gases. The open and freely available ACT-America data sets provide airborne in situ measurements of atmospheric carbon dioxide, methane, trace gases, aerosols, clouds, and meteorological properties, airborne remote sensing measurements of aerosol backscatter, atmospheric boundary layer height and columnar content of atmospheric carbon dioxide, tower-based measurements, and modeled atmospheric mole fractions and regional carbon fluxes of greenhouse gases over the Central and Eastern United States. We conducted 121 research flights during five campaigns in four seasons during 2016-2019 over three regions of the US (Mid-Atlantic, Midwest and South) using two NASA research aircraft (B-200 and C-130).

Atmospheric CO(2) column measurements in cloudy conditions using intensity-modulated continuous-wave lidar at 1.57 micron.

This study evaluates the capability of atmospheric CO column measurements under cloudy conditions using an airborne intensity-modulated continuous-wave integrated-path-differential-absorption lidar operating in the 1.57-μm CO absorption band. The atmospheric CO column amounts from the aircraft to the tops of optically thick cumulus clouds and to the surface in the presence of optically thin clouds are retrieved from lidar data obtained during the summer 2011 and spring 2013 flight campaigns, respectively.

Modeling of intensity-modulated continuous-wave laser absorption spectrometer systems for atmospheric CO(2) column measurements.

The focus of this study is to model and validate the performance of intensity-modulated continuous-wave (IM-CW) CO(2) laser absorption spectrometer (LAS) systems and their CO(2) column measurements from airborne and satellite platforms. The model accounts for all fundamental physics of the instruments and their related CO(2) measurement environments, and the modeling results are presented statistically from simulation ensembles that include noise sources and uncertainties related to the LAS instruments and the measurement environments. The characteristics of simulated LAS systems are based on existing technologies and their implementation in existing systems.

Airborne measurements of CO2 column absorption and range using a pulsed direct-detection integrated path differential absorption lidar.

We report on airborne CO(2) column absorption measurements made in 2009 with a pulsed direct-detection lidar operating at 1572.33 nm and utilizing the integrated path differential absorption technique. We demonstrated these at different altitudes from an aircraft in July and August in flights over four locations in the central and eastern United States.

Atmospheric CO2 column measurements with an airborne intensity-modulated continuous wave 1.57 μm fiber laser lidar.

The 2007 National Research Council (NRC) Decadal Survey on Earth Science and Applications from Space recommended Active Sensing of CO(2) Emissions over Nights, Days, and Seasons (ASCENDS) as a midterm, Tier II, NASA space mission. ITT Exelis, formerly ITT Corp., and NASA Langley Research Center have been working together since 2004 to develop and demonstrate a prototype laser absorption spectrometer for making high-precision, column CO(2) mixing ratio measurements needed for the ASCENDS mission.