Atmospheric Aerosol Chemical Composition Measurements for the Subsonic Aircraft: Contrail and Cloud Effects Special Study (SUCCESS)

We received funding to provide measurements of the chemical composition of aerosols aboard the NASA Ames DC-8 research aircraft during the SUCCESS mission. These measurements were successfully completed and the final data resides in the Cloud I computer archive at NASA Ames Research Center. The interpretation of the data obtained on this mission over the central United States has been published in special issues of Geophysical Research Letters. The papers with the University of New Hampshire as first author constitute this report and summarize the salient features of our data. The paper by Talbot et al. discusses the impact of vertical transport on free tropospheric chemistry over the the central USA in springtime. This transport was a dominant feature of the aerosol chemistry during SUCCESS. The paper by Dibb et al. discusses aerosol chemistry specifically as it related to free tropospheric sulfate related to jet exhaust and surface sources. Somewhat surprisingly, we found that surface sources appeared to dominant the distribution of aerosol sulfate in the free troposphere. In addition to these first authored papers, researchers from the University of New Hampshire were co-authors on numerous other companion papers in the special issues.