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| ___________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ The field campaign:
The NAWDEX period was
characterized by dynamically-active atmospheric
circulation including a large variety of weather
situation such as an extratropical transition of a
tropical cyclone, deep extratropical cyclones
associated with intense WCBs, small-scale
tropopause polar vortices, cut-off formation from
breaking wave, atmospheric rivers as well as
downstream impact over the Mediterranean area. At
larger scales, the campaign was dominated by a
long-lasting blocking situation which brings
interesting predictability issues to investigate.
Intensive observation periods (IOPs) of NAWDEX are
very exciting cases because the observed phenomena
are well-known to create a loss of predictability
in mid-latitudes (e.g, extratropical transition of
a tropical cyclone, blocking, cut-off).
Four aircraft from three different countries were deployed: the German High Altitude and LOng Range Research Aircraft (HALO), the Deutsches Zentrum für Luft- und Raumfahrt (DLR) Dassault Falcon 20, the French Service des Avions Français Instrumentés pour la Recherche en Environnement (SAFIRE) Falcon 20, and the British Facility for Airborne Atmospheric Measurements (FAAM) BAe 146.
Figure 2: Tracks of the research flights of the four aircraft
The deployment of the SAFIRE Falcon 20 was funded by ESA, CNES and EUFAR. The French component of the field campaign was co-funded by CNRS/INSU/LEFE, IPSL and Météo-France. Here
above a movie describing the SAFIRE fleet of aircraft and
the NAWDEX field campaign
Table 1 is a
summary of the SAFIRE flights that were conducted
during NAWDEX. The aircraft has an endurance of 3.5
hours and all the SAFIRE flights were done in the
Greenland-Iceland-Scotland area. During that almost
2-weeks period, 15 scientific flights were conducted
for a total of 46.5 flight hours. 59 dropsondes were
launched and their measurements are complementary to
the remote sensing platform RALI on board the SAFIRE
F20 aircraft.
  RALI
includes a multi-beam 95-GHz Doppler radar RASTA
(RAdar SysTem Airborne), a high-resolution lidar LNG
(Leandre New Generation) and an infrared radiometer
CLIMAT. The lidar and radar were both developed at
LATMOS, one of the partners of the present
project. The
radar has 3 antennas looking down that allow to
retrieve cloud winds which is
particularly welcome to study warm conveyor belts.
RALI also provides information about contents in cloud water
and ice, and cloud microstructure
(precipitating/non-precipitating) occurring in the
different sectors of an extratropical cyclone.
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