An extensive database of airborne trace gas and meteorological observations from the Alpha Jet Atmospheric eXperiment (AJAX)

Abstract

The Alpha Jet Atmospheric eXperiment (AJAX) flew scientific flights between 2011 and 2018 providing measurements of trace gas species and meteorological parameters over California and Nevada, USA. This paper describes the observations made by the AJAX program over 229 flights and approximately 450 hours of flying. AJAX was a multi-year, multi-objective, multi-instrument program with a variety of sampling strategies resulting in an extensive dataset of interest to a wide variety of users. Some of the more common flight objectives include satellite calibration/validation (GOSAT, OCO-2, TROPOMI) at Railroad Valley and other locations, and long-term observations of free-troposphere and boundary layer ozone allowing for studies of stratosphere-to-troposphere transport and long-range transport to the western United States. AJAX also performed topical studies such as sampling wildfire emissions, urban outflow, and atmospheric rivers. Airborne measurements of carbon dioxide, methane, ozone, formaldehyde, water vapor, temperature, pressure, and 3-D winds made by the AJAX program have been published at NASA’s Airborne Science Data Center.