Climate, Process Studies and Traditional Mannned Aircraft Field Campaigns

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Climate, Process Studies and Traditional Mannned
Aircraft Field Campaigns

• Warren Wiscombe
• DOE-ARM Chief Scientist

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• DOEs metric specify a safe level of
  greenhouse gases by 2015.
• The only route better climate models.
• But climate models require
• process studies leading to parameterizations,
  and
• testing against observations.
• Field campaigns with peopled aircraft are one
  traditional approach to both goals.
• (Gathering routine long-term datasets from
  satellites and surface networks is another.)

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In ARM, we are always challenged as to why our
observations arent leading to more rapid
improvements in climate models. One delay is the
several-year lead time for doing field campaigns,
and the several-more-year wait to fix the
inevitable problems and shortfalls in the first
campaign. (ARESE, CLASIC) If you want answers
faster, this is not the way.
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ARMs solution has been to collect routine data
between field campaigns. This is fine, but its
just point data. Climate models predict area
averages. ARMs solution to that was to cover
Oklahoma with 30 Extended Facilities. But that
doesnt work for our sites in Alaska and the
Tropical Pacific.
cf new routine AVP program
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For our remote sites, we need some other way to
get area averages. Small UAVs would be one way
to do that. They cant measure everything but it
would sure beat a single point. We now have
permission to fly small UAVs in an extremely
restricted zone around Oliktok Point in Alaska
... but we need to be able to range more widely.
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What are the problems with traditional manned a/c
field campaigns?

• years to implement years more to iterate
• high cost
• Golden Day Syndrome
• biases daytime, etc.
• sometimes pilot-driven, not science-driven
• short flights
• statistically significant sampling
• scaling up to climate-model area averages
• dont test remote sensors
• scale-babel (and other differences among a/c)

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How can climate scientists fix these problems?

• - drastically increase speed of deployment
• drastically lower cost of deployment
• drastically increase length of deployment, to
• - avoid Golden Day Syndrome
• - wait out runs of bad luck
• - get statistically significant results
• drastically increase time of individual flights,
  to at least cover the diurnal cycle
• stop being pilot-driven
• (does this sound like small UAVs yet?)

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Manned a/c field campaigns have a kind of
rigidity which is the antithesis of spontaneous
science. Discoveries are made occasionally, but
the paradigm is not discovery-oriented. 90 of
the time is spent organizing. Cheap
rapidly-iterated science gives much more sense of
progress. Universities used to have their own
a/c for this purpose, but no more. Small UAVs
could help...
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ARM backed away from large UAVs because currently
they dont offer as much bang for the buck as
flying cheap manned a/c routinely. For 7 years,
ARM has supported the NOAA Cessna program for
aerosol measts in Oklahoma. It cost under
150K/year till recently. Now ARM is extending
this paradigm to clouds. Still need small UAVs!