NASA TRACE-A Project

The Atlantic Ocean between southern Africa and South America was the focus of the TRACE-A mission from September 21 to October 24, 1992. This dataset contains balloonsonde and ozonesonde data, along with aircraft and rawinsonde data collected in Brazil, to investigate high tropospheric ozone concentrations. NASA conducted the mission in partnership with the Brazilian Space Agency (INPE), utilizing a DC-8 aircraft equipped with 19 specialized instruments.

Use Cases

• Modeling ozone transport and photochemistry based on in-situ ozone, CO, and N2O measurements.
• Analyzing vertical atmospheric profiles based on data from balloonsondes measuring ozone, temperature, and pressure.
• Studying aerosol distributions based on measurements from the Differential Absorption Lidar (DIAL) instrument.
• Investigating trace gas correlations based on spectrometer data for CO, O3, N2O, CH4, and CO2.

Strengths

• Data collection is complete for the campaign, providing a finalized snapshot.
• Mission utilized a NASA DC-8 aircraft equipped with 19 distinct scientific instruments.
• Partnership with the Brazilian Space Agency (INPE) likely enhanced regional data coverage.

Limitations

• Column-level documentation is absent; field semantics must be inferred after download.
• Row count is unknown, which may limit suitability assessment for large-scale ML.
• Last update date is unknown; freshness unverified.

Provenance

Source

NASA's Global Tropospheric Experiment (GTE).

Collection Method

Collected via NASA DC-8 aircraft instruments, ozonesondes, and rawinsondes.

Time Range

September 21 to October 24, 1992.

Freshness

Data collection was completed for the 1992 campaign; the dataset is historical.

Geography

Atlantic Ocean between southern Africa and South America, with additional data from Brazil.