Kristopher M. Bedka

The NASA Aerosol Wind Profiler (AWP) instrument, described in Part I of this paper, was flown aboard a NASA Gulfstream-3 aircraft during its first two airborne science campaigns based in Hampton, Virginia and central California in September–November 2024. These campaigns were focused on demonstrating how a coherent-detection Doppler wind lidar could address NOAA wind observation requirements, and to observe planetary boundary layer processes to address NASA and U.S. Naval Research Laboratory science objectives in conjunction with High Altitude Lidar Observatory (HALO) differential absorption lidar (DIAL) water vapor and high spectral resolution lidar (HSRL) aerosol profiling. AWP observed a wide variety of weather regimes and phenomena with high detail (66–133 m vertical and 0.6–4 km spatial resolution, scan pattern dependent) and precision (.1 m/s bias, 0.89 m/s uncertainty) over nearly 100 hours of data collection. This is Part II of the AWP instrument description and airborne demonstration paper series that highlights wind profile measurements from Fall 2024 campaign flights and quantifies measurement performance with co-located Airborne Vertical Atmospheric Profiling System (AVAPS) dropsonde and NOAA Global Forecast System (GFS) wind profiles.

There is a well-recognized need for new orbital 3-dimensional (3-D) wind measurements to improve weather prediction and understanding of atmospheric processes. A new airborne, coherent-detection Doppler wind lidar system called the Aerosol Wind Profiler (AWP) has recently been developed at NASA to address community wind measurement needs and demonstrate technologies needed for an orbital wind lidar mission, leveraging decades of NASA Langley Research Center and industry partner experience with wind lidar instrumentation. This paper describes the AWP instrument, data collection methods, and 3-D wind profile retrieval methods applied to data from its first science campaigns that occurred from September–November 2024. Additional demonstrations of AWP observations and their validation are provided in Part II of this paper.

There is a well-recognized need for new orbital 3-dimensional (3-D) wind measurements to improve weather prediction and understanding of atmospheric processes. A new airborne, coherent-detection Doppler wind lidar system called the Aerosol Wind Profiler (AWP) has recently been developed at NASA to address community wind measurement needs and demonstrate technologies needed for an orbital wind lidar mission, leveraging decades of NASA Langley Research Center and industry partner experience with wind lidar instrumentation. This paper describes the AWP instrument, data collection methods, and 3-D wind profile retrieval methods applied to data from its first science campaigns that occurred from September–November 2024. Additional demonstrations of AWP observations and their validation are provided in Part II of this paper.

There is a well-recognized need for new orbital 3-dimensional (3-D) wind measurements to improve weather prediction and understanding of atmospheric processes. A new airborne, coherent-detection Doppler wind lidar system called the Aerosol Wind Profiler (AWP) has recently been developed at NASA to address community wind measurement needs and demonstrate technologies needed for an orbital wind lidar mission, leveraging decades of NASA Langley Research Center and industry partner experience with wind lidar instrumentation. This paper describes the AWP instrument, data collection methods, and 3-D wind profile retrieval methods applied to data from its first science campaigns that occurred from September–November 2024. Additional demonstrations of AWP observations and their validation are provided in Part II of this paper.

Prior studies have linked increased environmental moisture to larger tropical oceanic mesoscale convective systems (MCSs) and higher rainfall rates, with conditional dependence on vertical wind shear and mixed results across studies. A challenge in comparing these observations across studies and regions is the use of different datasets (i.e., satellite, reanalysis, and models), with limited in situ observations over tropical oceans, and differing definitions of MCSs, moisture, and wind shear. To address data sparsity in the East Atlantic, NASA’s Convective Processes Experiment-Cabo Verde (CPEX-CV) conducted multiple Research flights (RFs) in 2022 using modern remote sensing and dropsonde instrumentation to sample a variety of oceanic MCSs and their environments. This study uses high-resolution CPEX-CV airborne observations to examine the interaction between near-storm moisture, vertical shear, and oceanic MCS characteristics in the East Atlantic, and evaluates the sensitivity of these relationships to dataset. Using an MCS tracker with geostationary satellite data as a storm-relative framework, we compared moisture-shear-convection relationships between remote sensors, dropsondes, and reanalysis for RFs 7 and 11. Most datasets showed a long-lived MCS growing in a moister mid-level and lower deep-layer shear environment than a short-lived, less intense storm. However, moisture-convection relationships were less clear when using remote sensor data, owing to sampling biases that affected conclusions about the temporal evolution of both cases, as well as challenges in reanalysis representing observed convection. These findings suggest that using different datasets can yield different conclusions about MCS-environment relationships, with implications for tropical regions with limited data availability.

The NASA Aerosol Wind Profiler (AWP) instrument, described in Part I of this paper, was flown aboard a NASA Gulfstream-3 aircraft during its first two airborne science campaigns based in Hampton, Virginia and central California in September–November 2024. These campaigns were focused on demonstrating how a coherent-detection Doppler wind lidar could address NOAA wind observation requirements, and to observe planetary boundary layer processes to address NASA and U.S. Naval Research Laboratory science objectives in conjunction with High Altitude Lidar Observatory (HALO) differential absorption lidar (DIAL) water vapor and high spectral resolution lidar (HSRL) aerosol profiling. AWP observed a wide variety of weather regimes and phenomena with high detail (66–133 m vertical and 0.6–4 km spatial resolution, scan pattern dependent) and precision (.1 m/s bias, 0.89 m/s uncertainty) over nearly 100 hours of data collection. This is Part II of the AWP instrument description and airborne demonstration paper series that highlights wind profile measurements from Fall 2024 campaign flights and quantifies measurement performance with co-located Airborne Vertical Atmospheric Profiling System (AVAPS) dropsonde and NOAA Global Forecast System (GFS) wind profiles.

There is a well-recognized need for new orbital 3-dimensional (3-D) wind measurements to improve weather prediction and understanding of atmospheric processes. A new airborne, coherent-detection Doppler wind lidar system called the Aerosol Wind Profiler (AWP) has recently been developed at NASA to address community wind measurement needs and demonstrate technologies needed for an orbital wind lidar mission, leveraging decades of NASA Langley Research Center and industry partner experience with wind lidar instrumentation. This paper describes the AWP instrument, data collection methods, and 3-D wind profile retrieval methods applied to data from its first science campaigns that occurred from September–November 2024. Additional demonstrations of AWP observations and their validation are provided in Part II of this paper.

There is a well-recognized need for new orbital 3-dimensional (3-D) wind measurements to improve weather prediction and understanding of atmospheric processes. A new airborne, coherent-detection Doppler wind lidar system called the Aerosol Wind Profiler (AWP) has recently been developed at NASA to address community wind measurement needs and demonstrate technologies needed for an orbital wind lidar mission, leveraging decades of NASA Langley Research Center and industry partner experience with wind lidar instrumentation. This paper describes the AWP instrument, data collection methods, and 3-D wind profile retrieval methods applied to data from its first science campaigns that occurred from September–November 2024. Additional demonstrations of AWP observations and their validation are provided in Part II of this paper.

There is a well-recognized need for new orbital 3-dimensional (3-D) wind measurements to improve weather prediction and understanding of atmospheric processes. A new airborne, coherent-detection Doppler wind lidar system called the Aerosol Wind Profiler (AWP) has recently been developed at NASA to address community wind measurement needs and demonstrate technologies needed for an orbital wind lidar mission, leveraging decades of NASA Langley Research Center and industry partner experience with wind lidar instrumentation. This paper describes the AWP instrument, data collection methods, and 3-D wind profile retrieval methods applied to data from its first science campaigns that occurred from September–November 2024. Additional demonstrations of AWP observations and their validation are provided in Part II of this paper.

Stratosphere‐troposphere exchange (STE) plays a crucial role in Earth's climate; however, the significance of small‐scale processes such as midlatitude convection to global STE remains understudied. Midlatitude tropopause‐overshooting convection is especially important to climate because it can enhance stratospheric water vapor, which has its greatest radiative forcing sensitivity in the extratropical lower stratosphere. Thus, it is essential to understand what factors influence the strength and prevalence of overshooting storms and associated STE. The U.S. Dynamics and Chemistry of the Summer Stratosphere (DCOTSS) field campaign during 2021 and 2022 was the first large‐scale airborne primarily focused on sampling stratospheric impacts from overshooting convection. Our research utilizes the extensive DCOTSS data set in combination with radar, satellite, and environmental observations to investigate relationships between observed stratosphere composition change and storm and environmental characteristics. Our results demonstrate greater magnitudes of STE for above‐anvil cirrus plume (AACP)‐producing storms and mesoscale convective systems (MCSs). In addition, the most extreme enhancements in water vapor and other tropospheric gases occur where the tropopause height is low and the depth of overshooting is high, especially for AACP‐producing storms. We also investigate the impact of storm and environmental characteristics on pathways for hydration (air mass transport and mixing vs. ice sublimation), finding that they also modulate the frequencies of each process at different altitudes. Namely, mixing is found to be most prevalent in AACP‐producing storms and MCSs, which can help explain transport differences between water vapor and other gases.