I have completed my portion of ATom-2, landing in Christchurch, New Zealand on February 6th, and leaving New Zealand on February 9th. It took a couple of days for me to readjust my internal clock to where I live (Boulder, CO). Upon writing this post, the NASA DC-8, and the scientists, have already flown to… Read More
Between February 3rd and February 6th, we completed two more legs of the Pacific tour of ATom: flight from Alaska to Hawaii and flight from Hawaii to Fiji. These two flights allowed us to sample extremely remote northern mid-latitude and tropical Pacific air, to investigate how “remote” versus how impacted this air was with pollutants… Read More
We completed the 2nd flight of ATom-2, flying from Palmdale, CA to Anchorage, AK. This flight provided an opportunity to look at background air, and pollution, as it is entering western United States and Canada, during winter, and to investigate winter Arctic background pollution. One of the nice things about this flight is that it… Read More
ATom-2 has started! For those of you that had not read my prior blogs, this is a continuation of ATom-1. But if we have already completed 1 ATom, why do another one??????? The over-arching goal of this campaign (4 in total) is to investigate the seasonality of background air composition and seasonality in the transport… Read More
I am back at Colorado University, Boulder, and no longer jet-legged, after participating in the first half of ATom. After the Hawaii post, the NASA DC-8 traveled to America Samoa in order to sample the difference between northern and southern hemispheric background pollution and transport. We did observe a decrease in the amount of pollution… Read More
In many atmospheric chemistry campaigns, the measurements and scientists are focused in one field. For example, the campaign I participated in for my graduate degree, the Deep Convective Clouds and Chemistry campaign, the research focused on deep convection (lightning storms) and the impact of deep convection on chemistry. Similarly, the work I did this summer,… Read More
For those of you that were following me during KORUS-AQ, you can now see this is a very busy summer for me, collecting observations. Yesterday marks the first research flight of ATom-1, but you may be wondering what ATom is and why there is a 1 behind it. ATom stands for Atmospheric Tomography, which basically means… Read More
My name is Benjamin Nault, and I am a postdoctoral researcher at University of Colorado, Boulder. My research focuses on the chemistry of aerosols (which I will go into more detail in a later blog or when asked in comments). This blog will be documenting my adventures during two NASA aircraft campaigns during this summer… Read More
