SGER: Flight Planning and Meteorological Analysis in Support of the HIAPER Progressive Science Mission

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This Small Grant for Exploratory Research (SGER) will support flight planning and meteorological analyses in support of the Stratosphere-Troposphere Analyses of Regional Transport (START) airborne mission. The scientific objectives of the START experiment are to study the dynamical and chemical properties of the upper troposphere/lower stratosphere (UT/LS) region. START will pursue these objectives through the measurement of a set of chemical tracers and meteorological parameters (including temperature and winds fields), combined with model analyses. This project will contribute post-mission analysis efforts, including back trajectories for aircraft flight tracks, maps of meteorological parameters, cross sections of meteorological parameters along the flight track, and integration of meteorological analyses with available satellite data, as well as a posteriori analysis of the flow deformation.START is one of the HIAPER (High-Altitude Instrumented Airborne Platform for Environmental Research) Progressive Science missions, which are designed to learn about operational aspects of the HIAPER aircraft for research and to demonstrate the capabilities of HIAPER with a limited payload of flight-tested instrumentation. This project will benefit the atmospheric research community by advancing the development of full flight research capabilities of the HIAPER aircraft. Due to the very short time interval until the beginning of the START mission, this project was submitted as an SGER.