ORACLES Coordinated Missions

The UK CLARIFY (CLouds and Aerosol Radiative Impacts and Forcing: Year 2017) campaign brought the BAe-146 plane to Ascension Island during the same time as ORACLES-2017. CLARIFY's goal is to improve the representation and reduce uncertainty in UK Meteorological Office model estimates of the direct, semi-direct and indirect radiative effects, focusing on features more local to Ascension Island. The ORACLES-2017 deployment included an explicitly coordinated flight with the BAe-146.

The DOE LASIC (Layed Atlantic Smoke Interactions with Clouds; http://www.lasic.doe.gov) campaign deploys the ARM Mobile Facility 1 (AMF1) to Ascension Island (8S, 14.5W) from June 1, 2016 - October 31, 2017. Ascension Island is located 3500 km offshore in the trade-wind cumulus regime, over near-equatorial warm waters. Its deepening boundary layer, combined with the subsiding aerosol layer aloft, increases the chances that smoke will be entrained into the cloud layer.  LASIC includes a large suite of both aerosol in-situ and remote sensors and cloud remote sensors. Multiple radiosondes per day provide the first characterization of the diurnal cycle with and without smoke present overhead.

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The French AEROCLO-sA (AErosol RadiatiOn and CLouds in southern Africa) project, was based in Henties Bay, Namibia during August-September 2017, with the Falcon 20 aircraft operating out of Walvis Bay. The Henties Bay site has been taking detailed aerosol column and in-situ measurements since 2012. The AEROCLO-Sa measurements provide information on conditions to the south of the ORACLES-2017 deployment. 

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Enhanced in-situ observations of fog over the Namib Desert were also made by German and southern African researchers concurrently with ORACLES.
 
You can learn more about all of the campaigns through a Special Issue of the ACP and AMT Copernicus journals (and make ’Special Issue’ a link to https://www.atmos-chem-phys.net/special_issue978.html  .