This award is funded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Public Law 111-5).
Experimental research in boundary layer meteorology requires information both on direct surface-atmosphere exchanges of energy and moisture as well as profiles of meteorological parameters extending into the lower part of the atmosphere. By combining experimental and educational goals of multiple projects involving five departments at three California State University (CSU) campuses, this effort supported through NSF's Major Research Instrumentation (MRI-R2) program will allow procurement and integration of a highly agile mobile atmospheric profiling system (CSU-MAPS). This system includes micro-meteorological instruments mounted on a telescopic 30-meter tall tower, as well as two vertically pointing remote sensing systems (viz. a microwave profiler and wind LIDAR), all to be designed for rapid deployment via a trailer-mounted arrangement. Together these instruments will profile temperature and water vapor at two heights near 10 km above ground level. A combination of low-level in-situ and remotely sensed measurements extending to heights near 10 km will be supplemented by a more standard rawinsonde system providing occasional balloon-based profiles to even higher levels.
The intellectual merit of this effort centers on support for fields as diverse as wildfire science and renewable energy exploration and by allowing exceedingly rapid deployment of high-quality measurement systems in response to rapidly evolving weather and wildfire conditions. Research supported by collaborating faculty will extend to topics including (though not limited to) urban meteorology, wetland micrometeorology, associated carbon fluxes, wind-energy prospecting, marine-atmosphere interactions along coastal zones, and controls on development of severe thunderstorms.
Broader impacts will come through improved understanding of geophysical phenomena in regions of complex terrain and coastlines, by providing students with hands-on student experience in planning and conducting field measurements, and through a range of associated practical skills. CSU-MAPS and the observations it collects will provide the foundation for three separate University courses on meteorological instrumentation and measurements. Through these involvements, more than 500 students across three campuses will benefit during each year of its operation. Outreach to K-12 students is also planned. More than half of the involved students will be drawn from underrepresented groups.
This project developed a mobile atmospheric profiling system, which can be rapidly deployed in remote locations to measure a comprehensive array of meteorological properties from the surface to mid-troposphere. The California State University-Mobile Atmospheric Profiling System (CSU-MAPS) is a shared facility between San Francisco State and San José State Universities, providing CSU researchers and students with ‘state-of-the-art’ atmospheric instruments. CSU-MAPS was designed to be the ideal tool to tackle a wide array of important scientific questions ranging from wild-fire meteorology to ecosystem carbon and water cycling to urban climatology and air quality. The CSU-MAPS is comprised of commercially available instruments including; micrometeorological sensors mounted on a mobile extendable tower, a scanning Doppler wind lidar to measure vertical profiles of three dimensional wind fields, a microwave temperature and humidity profiler, and an upper-air weather balloon system. The main observational platform is a telescopic 32-m (106 ft) tower mounted on a twin-axle trailer. The tower is towed horizontally to the measurement site, braced with outriggers and leveled with built in jacks and then extended vertically. The system can be operational in less then 30 min with two personnel. The trailer is towed using a F250 4x4 pickup truck equipped with surface weather instrumentation and laptop workstations for operating the Doppler lidar and microwave profiler which are mounted in the truck bed using a custom-fabricated, shock-limiting frame. The comprehensive and flexible design of the measurement system allows for a large range of important research projects to be tackled. To date, the system has been used in four major field experiments. During 2011, CSU-MAPS was deployed to Salt Lake City, Utah during the Persistent Cold Air Pool Study (PCAPS) to investigate the development of persistent cold air pools that lead to week-long periods of extremely high air pollution levels that frequently exceed national health standards. In 2012, the CSU-MAPS was deployed to three wildland fire experiments in California, Florida, and Texas. These experiments required rapid-response deployment scenarios in order to make measurements fire-induced winds in and around experimental fires. The CSU-MAPS is a resource for wildfire management agencies throughout the western United States and will provide unprecedented data for monitoring and forecasting fire weather and fire behavior conditions during fire season. The CSU-MAPS has also been used to measure carbon, water and energy cycling between ecosystems and the atmosphere. To date we have investigated these in a restored montane meadow in the Sierra Nevada Mountains in Northern California and on the largest living roof in California, located on the California Academy of Sciences building in San Francisco. In addition to these and future scientific research goals, CSU-MAPS has been used extensively as an educational tool. This involves students from numerous classes across two campuses in experiential learning and includes an annual fieldtrip where students from both San José State and San Francisco State Universities deploy the system in a mountain valley for a week and analyze the data.
