The investigators will build an atmospheric lidar instrument and an airglow imager for deployment on the NSF/NCAR Gulfstream-V (NGV) aircraft. The instruments are designed to make measurements important for studying the impacts of internal gravity waves (GWs) in atmospheric dynamics, and in the chemical, microphysical, and plasma processes they influence. In the stratosphere, GW effects include severe turbulence at flight altitudes, creation of polar stratospheric clouds that contribute to ozone destruction, and systematic influences on the large-scale circulation. Large-scale GWs also have similar, but largely unknown, effects extending well into the thermosphere and ionosphere. The Southern Andes -- ANtarctic GRavity wave InitiAtive (SAANGRIA) is a program that would employ the NGV research aircraft to measure gravity wave effects over the southern Andes, the Drake Passage, and the Antarctic Peninsula, which is believed to be the most dynamically active region on Earth in terms of GW forcing.
Current NGV instruments are well suited to lower atmosphere SAANGRIA observations, but do not address climate and mesosphere-lower thermosphere science topics fully. The new stratospheric and mesosphere and lower thermosphere (MLT) NGV instruments would include Rayleigh and resonance lidars and a Mesospheric Temperature Mapper that would measure temperatures and vertical winds spanning altitudes from immediately above the NGV flight altitude (~13 km) to ~100 km. These instruments will remain as NGV "facility" instruments thereafter, thus greatly enhancing the scientific benefits of the NCAR facilities for flight programs by NSF investigators in the future. The information obtained from these measurements will benefit the research community and society by helping to improve numerical weather prediction, general circulation modeling, and climate studies.
