NASA ATom Mission Global Aircraft Flight Track and Navigation Data

NASA's Atmospheric Tomography Mission (ATom) provides flight track and navigational data from four global-scale airborne campaigns conducted between 2016 and 2018. The dataset records the DC-8 aircraft's position and state at 10-second intervals across all seasons, covering flights from the Arctic to the South Pacific and the Atlantic. This contiguous dataset is intended for mapping atmospheric model results onto precise flight paths for validation.

Use Cases

• Mapping outputs from global atmospheric models onto the precise latitude, longitude, and altitude coordinates of the flight tracks for direct comparison.
• Analyzing seasonal variations in flight patterns and atmospheric sampling across the four campaigns (ATom-1 to ATom-4) from 2016 to 2018.
• Correlating aircraft navigational data like pressure and temperature with other ATom mission gas and aerosol measurements for integrated atmospheric profiling.
• Studying specific flight legs, such as transects over the Arctic or South Pacific, using the research flight number, date, and start/stop time intervals.

Strengths

• Provides a contiguous, global-scale dataset with flights spanning from 0.2 to 12 km altitude across the Arctic, Pacific, Atlantic, and North America.
• Data is recorded at a high temporal resolution of 10-second intervals for precise track reconstruction.
• Covers four distinct seasonal campaigns over a multi-year period from 2016 to 2018.

Limitations

• Specific row counts, file sizes, and the complete column schema are not provided on any platform.
• Conflicting last update dates exist between sources (2018-05-21 on NASA Earthdata and 2026-03-13 on Data.gov).

Provenance

Source

National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA)

Collection Method

Data gathered from instrumentation on the NASA DC-8 aircraft during systematic atmospheric sampling campaigns.

Time Range

2016 to 2018

Freshness

2026-03 13 14:05:38.960260

Geography

Global, with flight tracks covering the western Arctic, South Pacific, Atlantic, Greenland, and central North America.