Wyoming King Air as a National Facility

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The primary objective of this project is to provide a mission-ready aircraft (the University of Wyoming King Air) to the geoscience research community. The University of Wyoming King Air fulfills a unique role in the suite of lower atmosphere observing facilities supported by the National Science Foundation. This research aircraft provides a small, light weight, and relatively inexpensive aircraft as an agile airborne platform for cloud, precipitation, atmospheric chemistry, wildfire, and boundary layer meteorological research. During the five-year award period, scientists funded by the National Science Foundation may request the use of the aircraft, the cloud radar, and/or the cloud lidar through the Lower Atmosphere Observing Facilities Program for the purpose of conducting atmospheric research. This award provides base support to a staff of scientists, engineers, technicians, pilots, and mechanics, who maintain and deploy the aircraft and instrumentation for this cutting-edge research aircraft. The award includes scientific effort to support field deployments of the facility, data assurance and quality control, delivery and archiving of data products accessible to the entire scientific community; and the engineering effort for instrumentation and software upgrades that will enhance the scientific and educational benefit to the community. The impact of the research enabled by the facility may be broad and far-reaching depending on the individual projects that request its use through the National Science Foundation's Lower Atmospheric Observing Facilities Program.The Wyoming research aircraft along with the Wyoming Cloud Radar, the Wyoming Cloud Lidar, and associated research instruments will enable acquisition of airborne in-situ and remote sensing measurements to address a broad range of geoscience-related topics. Support of the facility will ensure access to a mission-ready research aircraft and associated instrumentation. The Wyoming King Air is capable of use in studies ranging from cloud-aerosol interaction, to boundary-layer dynamics, air quality, cloud and precipitation physics, and chemistry of trace gases and aerosol. The data collected by the Wyoming King Air facility will take advantage of the combined in situ measurements from the aircraft and remote sensing capability of the Wyoming Cloud Radar and the Wyoming Cloud Lidar, targeting projects that can benefit from the agility of the aircraft and its low cost of operation. The measurement capabilities available to the geoscience community through this award will provide a greater understanding of atmospheric properties and composition, inform new ideas about atmospheric processes, feed numerical models to improve atmospheric representation, and ultimately lead to greater predictability of the earth-atmosphere weather and climate systems. In addition to the far-reaching broader impacts of the scientific studies that are enabled by the aircraft, the impacts of the work supported through this award are rooted in their contribution to education and training of the next generation of observational atmospheric scientists. Since the University of Wyoming King Air is owned and operated by a university, it provides a natural setting for educating and training young scientists in obtaining and using airborne atmospheric observations and in the development of tools and techniques for maintaining, calibrating, and assessing airborne instrumentation. The skills developed by scientists who use and work with the facility and associated data sets are well-suited to train the next generation of atmospheric scientists to work within laboratories or other airborne research facilities across the country.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.