NASA ABLE-3A: Arctic Aircraft Trace Gas and Meteorological Data, 1988

The ABLE-3A campaign collected in-situ trace gas and meteorological data onboard a NASA Electra aircraft during July-August 1988. NASA conducted this suborbital campaign as part of the Arctic Boundary Layer Expedition to understand the near-surface atmospheric response to climate variability. Measurements included methane, carbon monoxide, ozone, aerosols, and other chemical species over Arctic and subarctic regions of North America and Greenland.

Use Cases

• Modeling tropospheric ozone budgets in the Arctic based on the measured O3, NO, and NO2 concentrations.
• Analyzing long-range transport of pollutants to the Arctic based on trace gas and aerosol composition data.
• Studying seasonal atmospheric chemical changes as climate indicators based on the summer campaign timing.
• Correlating meteorological conditions with trace gas distributions based on the combined metnav and chemistry data.

Strengths

• Data collection is explicitly stated as complete.
• Campaign employed multiple measurement techniques including gas chromatography and Laser Induced Fluorescence.
• Focused on a specific, critical seasonal period (summer) for Arctic atmospheric studies.

Limitations

• Column-level documentation is absent; field semantics must be inferred after download.
• Row count and dataset size are unknown, which may limit suitability assessment.
• Data is from a specific historical campaign (1988); temporal coverage is limited.

Provenance

Source

NASA

Collection Method

Airborne in-situ measurements using grab samples, gas chromatography, and Laser Induced Fluorescence onboard a Lockheed Electra aircraft.

Time Range

July-August 1988

Freshness

Last update date is unknown; freshness unverified.

Geography

Arctic and subarctic regions of North America and Greenland