NARVAL-II measurement campaign on Barbados and the South Atlantic

NARVAL-II measurement campaign over the southern Atlantic

NARVAL-II stands for the second part of the "Next generation Aircraft Remote-sensing for Validation studies" campaign and is flown from Barbados between 8.8. and 31.8.2016. The formation of tropical convection is the area of research the campaign is aimed at. With a set of instruments (most remopte sensing) the phenomenon of aggregating low level trade cumulus convection to larger deep convection and finally tropical storms is observed.

Partners from the universities of Cologne, Leipzig, Hamburg and LMU work together with the research centers Max-Planck-Institut Hamburg and Deutsches Zentrum für Luft-und Raumfahrt (DLR) in Oberpfaffenhofen. Drop sondes, gliding to the surface attached to a parachute, allow to characterize pressure, temperature and humidity around the cloud systems. The HAMP HALO Microwave Package measures water vapor profiles in the cloud free atmosphere under the aircraft using its passive radiometers.  Its radar component contributes clod information. The WALES lidar system measures mainly aerosol and water vapor profiles.

The cloud spectrometer specMACS of the LMU Meteorological Institute onboard adds horizontal spatial coverage to the profile information of all other instruments. From its spectral information cloud characteristics can be derived with a field-of-view of sesveral kilometres across the cloud path during the flight. The reconstruction of the three-dimensional cloud distribution should will be derived from its data (cloud optical thickness, cloud particle type and size, cloud height). These parameters would allow to estimate the 3D radiation budget of the convective system which is suspected to be an important factor in the observed aggregation of the scattered clouds to more organized convection.