NASA Campaigns
The National Aeronautics and Space Agency (NASA) has organized several field campaigns under the name Aura Validation Experiment (AVE) to perform focused measurements of atmospheric species by remote and in-situ sensing instruments in support of the validation of EOS-Aura satellite data products. For each campaign the OMI validation team compiled the OMI validation objectives documents that are available below.
Two of the AVE campaigns were based at Ellington Field, Houston, Texas, USA, from where the majority of flights by the NASA WB-57 aircraft in October/November of 2004 and in June of 2005 covered the Gulf of Mexico and the Midwest US. The Polar-AVE Campaign held in January/February of 2005 was based at Pease Tradeport, Portsmouth, New Hampshire, USA, from where the NASA DC-8 aircraft performed long-distance flights over snow covered North America, Canada and Greenland. The tropical AVE Campaign held in January/February of 2006 took place from Juan Santamaria International Airport in San Jose, Costa Rica, from where the NASA WB-57 aircraft traversed the Pacific Ocean between Costa Rica and the Galapagos Islands, the Caribbean Sea and the Sea of Panama.
Both NASA aircraft involved with AVE carried a suite of in-situ sampling and remote sensing instrumentation that are capable of obtaining correlative observations of columns and profiles of atmospheric species in regions of the globe where ground based observations are sparsely available and under atmospheric conditions that pose challenges to satellite data retrievals. With most ground based stations residing in pristine regions, AVE airborne observations provided OMI also with trace gas observations over atmospherically polluted regions that are important for validation and science.
Below please find available the various applicable documents. Unfortunately the information is restricted to avoid spamming of the mentioned email addresses. Please contact Mark Kroon. to gain access codes.
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NASA AVE White PaperLink to the document: AVE_whitepaper_1 |
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2004 January Pre-AVE (Pre-AVE) Ellington Field, Houston, TX, USA.Link to the document: Purpose of Houston Pre-AVE January 2004 |
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2004 October AVE (HAVE-1) Ellington Field, Houston, TX, USA.Link to the document: Purpose of Houston AVE October 2004 |
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2005 January AVE (PAVE) Pease Tradeport, Portsmouth, NH, USA.Link to the document: Purpose of Portsmouth AVE January 2005 |
2005 June AVE (HAVE-2) Ellington Field, Houston, TX, USA.Link to the document: Purpose of Houston AVE June 2005 | |
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2006 January (CRAVE) San Jose, Costa Rica.Link to the document: Purpose of Costa Rica AVE January 2006.pdf |