Collaborative Research: Measuring Carbon and Climate Tracers on the Atom Airborne Campaigns

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This project is a collaborative effort that supports the deployment of two instrument packages as part of the ATom campaign. The objective of ATom is to make "tomographic" type maps of the global distribution of aerosols, reactive gases, and short-lived climate forcing agents using aircraft measurements. The NSF-supported HIPPO campaign previously demonstrated the feasibility and advantages of the tomographic sampling used in the design of the ATom mission. In addition to the study of short-lived climate forcing agents, this project includes global-scale measurements that can advance other fundamental aspects of carbon and climate science, such as understanding the distribution of carbon sinks and the links between ocean biochemistry, carbon cycling, and climate change. The NASA-supported ATom project consists of four deployments in order to map distributions in all seasons. The instrument packages to be deployed include the Airborne Oxygen Instrument (AO2), which provides rapid in situ measurements of atmospheric O2 and CO2 concentrations, and a flask sampler that collects samples for analysis of O2/N2, CO2 concentration, CO2 isotopes and Ar/N2. By combining these measurements with large-scale atmospheric transport models, direct constraints on the corresponding air-sea fluxes of heat, O2, and CO2 are obtained. Atmospheric O2 measurements can reveal the vertical and latitudinal extent of hemispheric seasonal ocean O2 outgassing and in-gassing signals and define spatial gradients at enough times in the seasonal cycle to derive climatological annual-mean distributions.