CAST: Airborne and Ground Atmospheric Chemistry Measurements

The CAST dataset focuses on the Tropical Tropopause Layer over the Pacific Ocean and South East Asia. It contains in-situ airborne measurements from the FAAM BAe-146 aircraft deployed in Guam during January and February 2014, coordinated with NASA's Global Hawk. The collection also includes balloon-based ozone measurements and ground-based observations of ozone, CO2, CH4, CO, and very short-lived halogen species, complemented by regional and global atmospheric models.

Use Cases

• Studying transport and composition of the Tropical Tropopause Layer based on coordinated in-situ aircraft measurements.
• Analyzing trace gas distributions (e.g., CO2, CH4, CO) from ground-based and airborne observations.
• Validating regional high-resolution and global composition models using the collected atmospheric chemistry data.
• Investigating the role of very short-lived halogen species in atmospheric chemistry based on ground-based measurements.

Strengths

• Features coordinated multi-platform measurements from an aircraft, a high-altitude drone (NASA Global Hawk), and ground stations.
• Covers a specific, scientifically critical region (West Pacific/Southeast Asia) and time period (Jan/Feb 2014) for studying the Tropical Tropopause Layer.

Limitations

• Key metadata such as column names, row counts, file size, and specific license are not provided in the source descriptions.
• The dataset's temporal coverage is limited to a specific two-month campaign in early 2014.
• The source descriptions are repeated verbatim across multiple platform entries, suggesting potential metadata duplication rather than enrichment.

Provenance

Source

NERC Co-ordinated Airborne Studies in the Tropics (CAST) project, a collaboration with NASA's ATTREX programme. Data hosted by the Centre for Environmental Data Analysis.

Collection Method

Airborne in-situ measurements from the FAAM BAe-146 aircraft, balloon-based ozonesonde launches, and ground-based atmospheric chemistry instrumentation.

Time Range

January to February 2014

Freshness

Last updated metadata dates are reported as 2026-07-08, which appears to be a future date and may indicate a system error or placeholder value.

Geography

West Pacific, specifically Guam, and South East Asia; focusing on the Tropical Tropopause Layer.