Goal 5, Priority 2: Developing New Instrumentation
Advances in research on weather, climate, the water cycle, chemistry and dynamics of the upper troposphere/lower stratosphere, space weather and solar physics, and biogeosciences all require capabilities that stretch beyond those provided by EOL’s current suite of airborne and ground-based instruments. NCAR is tasked with developing a new generation of robust, inexpensive, easily deployable, and versatile instrument systems to address the university community’s need for these instruments, which facilitate their research efforts. Our extensive and talented scientific and engineering staff continually creates and test new instrumentation for studying the links between atmospheric composition and the biogeosciences, with systems for quantifying the surface-atmosphere exchange of gases and aerosols on whole-plant, whole-canopy, and regional scales using mobile laboratories and research aircraft.
FY2007 Accomplishments
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Secure within its gondola, the Sunrise telescope hangs suspended from its crane-like launch vehicle at dawn. (Photo by Carlye Calvin)
NCAR has completed a sophisticated gondola that will be carried approximately 25 miles into the atmosphere by a giant balloon and will support a 1-meter solar telescope that will capture images of the Sun's outer surface at a higher resolution than ever before. The first flight, scheduled for October of this year, will test the entire system including the complex pointing control. Closer to Earth, NCAR's adaptive sensor array wireless mesh network communication system will allow deployment of numerous low-power instruments in a variety of complex environments.
In FY2007, an important milestone in the Sunrise balloon-borne solar telescope project was reached with completion of balloon gondola construction at NCAR. This design and fabrication effort was a joint undertaking of ESSL's HAO and EOL. In October 2007, the sophisticated gondola carried a 1-m-aperture telescope to stratospheric altitudes, where it acquired the highest spatial resolution solar observations ever obtained. Science flights of the full instrumentation are scheduled to commence in 2009 in Kiruna, Sweden. This project is an international collaboration with the Max-Planck-Institut fur Sonnensystemforschung (Germany), the Kiepenheuer-Institut fur Sonnenphysik, (Germany), the Instituto de Astrofisica de Canarias (Spain), the University of Utrecht (The Netherlands), the Lockheed Martin Solar & Astrophysics Laboratory (USA), and the University of Chicago.
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Scientists for the first time have observed elusive oscillations in the Sun's corona, known as Alfvén waves, by tracking the motions of coronal plasma (charged particles and gas) around the entire edge of the Sun. In this series of images and animations, NCAR's Coronal Multi-channel Polarimeter instrument, or CoMP, captured the intensity of the light emitted from the solar corona (upper left), the line width or spectral extent over which the light is emitted (upper right), and the velocity (lower left). The oscillations of the plasma velocity are made clearer by filtering the velocity data to show only oscillations that recur periodically every five minutes. (lower right). (Image courtesy Steve Tomczyk and Scott McIntosh, NCAR.)
Recently, HAO’s Coronal Multi-channel Polarimeter (CoMP) instrument enabled a scientific breakthrough by imaging, for the first time, Alfvén waves in the solar corona. These waves were found in observations of the Doppler shift of coronal plasma in the coronal emission line at 1,074.7 nm. These waves are important in that they may transport energy from the turbulent photosphere and into the solar corona and it could explain why the solar corona is heated to a temperature of 1 million degrees.
In FY2007, NCAR and our user community collaborated to move the Community Airborne Platform Remote-Sensing Interdisciplinary Suite (CAPRIS) development forward. CAPRIS will be a new system within NSF/LAOF to serve observational needs of the climate, atmospheric chemistry, and meteorology communities by providing an unprecedented combination of coincident observations of precipitation, winds, cloud microphysics, water vapor, ozone, and aerosol at a wide range of temporal and spatial scales. The suite will work in conjunction with existing in-situ sensors on NSF/NCAR C-130 and NSF/NCAR GV aircraft in providing these observations. EOL has relied on community involvement via seminars and town meetings at various venues to seek community input on the design and capabilities of CAPRIS. In January 2008, EOL will submit a pre-proposal for CAPRIS in response to the midsize infrastructure solicitation ESSL/ACD scientists are also involved in many of the efforts described above to develop, improve, operate, and maintain a large number of instruments designed to measure trace gases, radicals, optical properties, and aerosols in the atmosphere, including ground-based, aircraft, and satellite instruments. Additionally, ACD scientists to improve and refine HIRDLS’ correction algorithms, making them more robust, and if possible developing a physical basis for them that would assure that they would work under all conditions. (When HIRDLS was launched on the Aura spacecraft in July 2004, a thin plastic film from inside HIRDLS came loose and obstructed most of the instrument's aperture, limiting the view to the atmosphere to a small fraction of the width of the optical beam.) More information on HIRDLS effort is available in the ESSL LAR.
In a significant move, The Advanced Technology Solar Telescope (ATST) received the go-ahead from the National Science Board in FY2007. The ATST is a large-aperture solar telescope project with a 4-meter diameter primary mirror that will have a collecting area 16 times larger than the largest existing solar telescope and will be able to operate at the diffraction limit thanks to an advanced adaptive optics system. This project has been ranked by the Decadal Survey of Astronomy and Astrophysics as the most important ground-based initiative for the next decade. In FY2008, Michael Knolker and Hector Socas-Navarro of ESSL/HAO will begin to support the construction phase of this major telescope in partnership with the NSO.
Over the past several years RAL scientists and engineers have developed the NEXRAD Turbulence Detection Algorithm (NTDA), a new approach to processing data from the National Weather Service’s network of Next Generation Radars (NEXRADs). By directly measuring the in-cloud turbulence intensity, the NTDA will provide airline dispatchers, air traffic managers, and pilots an important new source of information for tactical turbulence avoidance. In 2007, NTDA won final approval from the NEXRAD Technical Advisory Committee (TAC) and the NEXRAD Software Recommendation and Evaluation Committee, and the software package has now been delivered to the NEXRAD Radar Operations Center.
FY2008 Plans for Strategic Priority 2
Now under way, a new NCAR Program in Atmospheric Composition Remote Sensing and Prediction (ACRESP) will build on current ESSL/ACD-led satellite missions and expertise in satellite remote sensing science, Earth System modeling, and data assimilation. The first stage of the ACRESP Program will to develop the Satellite Observation Simulator and Assimilation System (SOSAS) capability in modeling and measurement of air quality. Parallel and related efforts on air quality satellite instrument Observation System Simulation Experiments, and chemical weather forecasts using existing satellite observations. Work in these areas will continue into FY2008.
The Prominence Magnetometer (ProMag), currently under construction at HAO, is an instrument specifically designed to perform high-precision spectro-polarimetry of prominences and filaments. The instrument design was supported by NCAR Opportunity Funds, and will observe in the HeI lines at 587.6 and 1,083 nm. We will install this instrument in 2008 at the prime focus of the 40-cm aperture Evans coronagraph at NSO’s Sacramento Peak Observatory.
Space limitations do not permit an extensive discussion of NCAR’s other development efforts. However, the following projects are moving forward at a minimum level:
- Wind lidar
- Compact Atmospheric Multi-species Spectrometer (CAMS) for the GV
- NO/NOy for the GV
- SATCOM products for the GV
- High-precision carbon dioxide ratio instrument
- High efficiency waveguide Difference Frequency Generation (DFG) instrument
- A water reference sounding system.
- See http://www.eol.ucar.edu/development/current-development-projects for more detailed information.
Final testing and deployment of NTDA is expected to occur in Summer 2008. A pilot program with United Airlines to test the uplink of the NTDA to the cockpit is expected to be expanded.
Related Lab Annual Report Sections:
Goal 5, Priority 2