EUREC⁴A observations from the SAFIRE ATR42 aircraft

Sandrine Bony (1) , Marie Lothon (2) , Julien Delanoë (3) , Pierre Coutris (4) , Jean-Claude Etienne (5) , Franziska Aemisegger (6) , Anna Lea Albright (1) , Thierry André (7) , Hubert Bellec (7) , Alexandre Baron (8) , Jean-François Bourdinot (7) , Pierre-Etienne Brilouet (5, 2) , Aurélien Bourdon (7) , Jean-Christophe Canonici (7) , Christophe Caudoux (9) , Patrick Chazette (8) , Michel Cluzeau (7) , Céline Cornet (10) , Jean-Philippe Desbios (7) , Dominique Duchanoy (7) , Cyrille Flamant (11) , Benjamin Fildier (1) , Christophe Gourbeyre (4) , Laurent Guiraud (7) , Tetyana Jiang (7) , Claude Lainard (7) , Christophe Le Gac (9) , Christian Lendroit (7) , Julien Lernould (7) , Thierry Perrin (7) , Frédéric Pouvesle (7) , Pascal Richard (5) , Nicolas Rochetin (1) , Kevin Salaün (7) , Alfons Schwarzenboeck (4) , Guillaume Seurat (7) , Bjorn Stevens (12) , Julien Totems (8) , Ludovic Touzé-Peiffer (1) , Gilles Vergez (7) , Jessica Vial (1) , Leonie Villiger (6) , Raphaela Vogel (1)

1 LMD - Laboratoire de Météorologie Dynamique (UMR 8539)
2 LAERO - Laboratoire d'aérologie
3 SPACE - LATMOS
4 LaMP - Laboratoire de Météorologie Physique
5 CNRM - Centre national de recherches météorologiques
6 IAC - Institute for Atmospheric and Climate Science [Zürich]
7 SAFIRE - Service des Avions Français Instrumentés pour la Recherche en Environnement
8 LSCE - Laboratoire des Sciences du Climat et de l'Environnement [Gif-sur-Yvette]
9 LATMOS - Laboratoire Atmosphères, Milieux, Observations Spatiales
10 LOA - Laboratoire d’Optique Atmosphérique - UMR 8518
11 TROPO - LATMOS
12 MPI-M - Max-Planck-Institut für Meteorologie

As part of the EUREC 4 A (Elucidating the role of cloud-circulation coupling in climate) field campaign, which took place in January and February 2020 over the western tropical Atlantic near Barbados, the French SAFIRE ATR42 research aircraft conducted 19 flights in the lower troposphere. Each flight followed a common flight pattern that sampled the atmosphere around the cloud-base level, at different heights of the subcloud layer, near the sea surface and in the lower free troposphere. The aircraft's payload included a backscatter lidar and a Doppler cloud radar that were both horizontally oriented, a Doppler 5 cloud radar looking upward, microphysical probes, a cavity ring-down spectrometer for water isotopes, a multiwavelength radiometer, a visible camera and multiple meteorological sensors, including fast rate sensors for turbulence measurements. With this instrumentation, the ATR characterized the macrophysical and microphysical properties of trade-wind clouds together with their thermodynamical, turbulent and radiative environment. This paper presents the airborne operations, the flight segmentation, the instrumentation, the data processing and the EUREC 4 A datasets produced from the ATR measurements. It 10 shows that the ATR measurements of humidity, wind and cloud-base cloud fraction measured with different techniques and samplings are internally consistent, that meteorological measurements are consistent with estimates from dropsondes launched from an overflying aircraft (HALO), and that water isotopic measurements are well correlated with data from the Barbados Cloud Observatory. This consistency demonstrates the robustness of the ATR measurements of humidity, wind, cloud-base 1

Domains: Atmospheric and Oceanic Physics [physics.ao-ph]; Climatology; Meteorology

Sandrine Bony, Marie Lothon, Julien Delanoë, Pierre Coutris, Jean-Claude Etienne, et al.. EUREC⁴A observations from the SAFIRE ATR42 aircraft. Earth System Science Data, 2022, 14 (4), pp.2021-2064. ⟨10.5194/essd-14-2021-2022⟩. ⟨insu-03517872v2⟩