During our one-month campaign in February 2018 we will aim to take observations on the stable atmospheric boundary layer over sea-ice, based on a variety of different systems. Our instrumentation includes a 10-m mast equipped with several eddy-covariance and other meteorological systems on six different levels for turbulence and profile measurements in the lowermost part of the atmospheric boundary layer. Since the lowermost 10-m are not really enough to learn something new about the stable boundary layer we will also make use of two sodar (sound detection and ranging systems) systems, which provide continuous vertical wind and turbulence profiles up to 1000 m at a vertical resolution of 10 m. After the first week of our campaign, we will get a lidar (light detection and ranging) system, which will provide similar data on the wind profile.
A good share of our time will be spent on flying our different drones or Remotely Piloted Aircraft Systems (RPAS) to take meteorological profiles of temperature, humidity, wind etc. For this we have a number of different fixed and rotary wing systems: We will use different small fixed-wing aircraft for atmospheric profiles to altitudes up to 1800 m. We will take profiles of the lowermost 200 to 400 m by different multi-copter systems. In addition, we have one fixed-wing system for turbulence measurements at fixed levels between 10 and 200 m above ground. Some of our aircraft are equipped with additional infrared sensors and cameras to provide surface temperature information and thermal images. To also achieve a high temporal resolution we will aim to conduct consecutive flights with only short breaks in between, when the atmospheric conditions are most interesting.
The observations from this campaign will hopefully result in an extensive high-resolution data set of observations on the stable ABL, which can be used for detailed investigations of the governing processes. The data will also be used in extensive modeling studies.