Full power engines and liftoff
of the Falcon 9 and PACE.
So you’ve successfully launched the newest ocean and atmospheric satellite:
PACE.
It’s powered up, instruments
working, tons of data flowing.
So, all the hard work is done.
There’s still one more step
to make sure all that data is 100% accurate
before the science community gets a hold of it.
And well,
this is where things get
complicated.
Bear with me here.
So go down to the Shearwater.
What time is the ER-2 overflying the Shearwater,
and can the Twin Otter get there at that time?
Yes. Barely.
There's, there's no just doing it in clouds either, so--
Once again, do you know if there's clouds
are going to be there in 11?
Can you confirm that for us?
It's the first spiral
that has the PACE overflight?
I want to make the Twin Otter overfly them.
I’m trying to climb at like,
200 feet per minute.
It's, like, painful.
In terms of aerosols over land,
we've maxed that out.
We've done everything we need to do.
The only thing we'd be trying to find
clear conditions over the ocean
with some aerosols there.
So PACE-PAX is
making sure
the observations of PACE
are what we think they are.
The idea here
is to go into the environment
to make measurements of the atmosphere,
of the ocean, of the surface
and compare those measurements
to the satellite measurements
of the same things
to make sure that what our satellite
is seeing all over the Earth is correct.
The PACE-PAX campaign has three main components:
two aircraft and a ship.
And all three need to operate
in precise coordination with overpasses of the PACE satellite.
Whether all three
or individual components,
the key is to sync up with PACE.
The whole team understands that timing is everything.
2132.
2132...yeah, we’re good. Yeah. We’re good--
So one of the things
that's going to be very important for us
is to keep track
of the timing of everything
so that we're making measurements,
say, on the boat
when the aircraft is flying over
or making measurements on the boat
when spacecraft is flying over as well.
They also needed to track the kinds
of different measurements
they were after.
To do that,
the science team came up with a list
of specific observation goals,
some 25 different combinations of land,
air and sea conditions
that the PACE satellite
could measure at any given moment.
And all of these pieces come together in California.
So California is great
because you can get to a wide variety
of different conditions.
California has
large urban areas, has large agricultural areas
like the Central Valley of California.
It has high mountain ranges. Has lots of
very interesting coastal areas,
different types of coastal waters.
There's a lot we can get to from California.
First stop is finding a really unique plane.
NASA’s Armstrong Flight Research Center is home to a high-altitude
aircraft, known as the ER-2.
The ER-2 flies between 60 and 70,000 feet,
about twice as high as a commercial airliner.
So this is about the closest
one can get to an observation from space
without actually being in space.
This is high enough in the atmosphere
that you can see the curvature of the Earth
and that the sky looks very, very dark, almost black.
Mounted in the wings and nose are special
airborne versions of the instruments
on the PACE satellite,
measuring atmospheric particles
all over the state.
As of yesterday
it looked like smoke was coming
from Oregon, from the north.
But today it looks like it's coming from the south--
You know, we're interested in aerosols,
and smoke is a type of aerosol.
And so we want it to be operating
in a part of the world
where we could find aerosols to use
when we're checking our ability to
to measure them from space.
So we chose California at this time of the year, September, in part
because it's a bit drier at this time of the year.
There's more likelihood for smoke from forest fires.
It turns out that there were, rather intensive forest fires
in the LA Basin not too long ago.
We were lucky to at least
be there at the right time and place to observe those very well.
So we definitely have a lot of data
that we're gonna be looking at,
and it would be very good test case for us
so that we can monitor these sorts of events
all around the world accurately.
Meanwhile, out on the coast,
PACE scientists on board the
NOAA Research Vessel Shearwater
are making daylong cruises
to measure the atmosphere from the ocean surface,
and collect data on how light interacts with water.
There’s many different instruments on Shearwater.
They’re like different types
of like robotic microsopes that are actually looking
at the diversity of the plankton.
They’re collecting different aspects of radiometry,
which is pretty much to learn more how the light is behaving
underneath the ocean and on the surface of the ocean.
And that's exactly what PACE is looking.
We're pretty much measuring everything
that PACE is measuring from space,
but like, for real, “in situ” as we call it.
Further up the coast,
another plane takes the middle ground,
below the ER-2 and above the Shearwater.
This plane flies between zero kilometers and 3 kilometers
and measures everything below the other plane
and below the satellite.
We’ve uploaded a bunch of instruments on the Twin Otter
so we can measure particles, clouds
and some limited gas phase data in situ.
In situ, meaning, it's making measurements of what the air is
like at that very point.
This Twin Otter is equipped
with an air intake, like a snorkel,
bringing in air from the outside
and splitting it into various instruments on board.
So here you see a bunch of different cloud probes
that were designed to
measure scattering from the particles.
There's also a probe here that measures
larger particles that are hard to get into the airplane,
things like dust or sea salt.
To get all those particles
into the instruments,
the flight plans often include strategic “spirals,”
where the Twin Otter flies in circles upward through a column of air
to capture the vertical distribution of aerosols.
The Twin Otter also has a unique vantage point
for observing a seasonal algal bloom of special interest
to a mission like PACE:
red tide.
Oh, there's a lot of red off our nose.
Yeah, is there?
Tons.
Oh, yeah.
Off, all off Moss Landing.
And off the right wing.
That's a lot of red.
Coordination of all of these parts of the mission,
you know, getting the different airplanes
or ships in the same location and place
as the satellites are flying over,
it's really complex.
Yep. Satellites.
As in more than one.
The PACE-PAX team is taking advantage
of this massive campaign
to validate the data from another satellite aimed
at determining the role of clouds and aerosols in climate,
EarthCARE.
We’re looking at EarthCARE and PACE over Reno.
There’s repeated observations over Monterey--
I'm the person kind of planning out the paths
for our sampling strategy for the ER-2,
the Twin Otter,
to have them coordinated as much as we can
with the PACE satellite.
It's all trying to put it all together,
hopefully at the same spot
at the same time,
sampling the same thing.
Start that westernmost line at 1953,
that's including two
spirals in Monterey Bay.
Skipping Monterey first because it’ll be cloudy there.
-Okay. -Right?
Going down to Santa Barbara first--
like, this is what Brian was saying, right?
It's evolutionary, I feel like.
It's revision.
So we have an idea, and then we're like, oh yeah, well,
if we extend this here,
we might be able to get that connection,
that coordination better.
On the last day for the Research Vessel,
one of those coordination exercises needs the ER-2
and the Twin Otter to fly over the Shearwater.
So they're going for a trifecta overpass:
a PACE, a spiral and an us?
Yeah!
PACE, Twin Otter--
Twin Otter, ER-2--
Da-naa-naaah!
We got 18 minutes to the overflight and--
Ten minutes to the Twin Otter overpass of the Shearwater.
Alright, let’s go up to just about 500 feet--
So the Twin Otter just turned,
so I'm assuming they started their points,
so they must be there.
-Yeah. -They’re over it.
They’re over the Shearwater?
Cool. Alright.
Seventeen Twin Otter flights,
thirteen ER-2 flights,
fifteen day trips on the Shearwater,
sixteen days of targeted observations during a PACE satellite overpass,
and seven days for EarthCARE.
A coordinated science campaign of this scale
would not be possible without the scientists, weather forecasters,
sailors, pilots, and support crews from across NASA,
NOAA, universities and its international partners.
The PACE-PAX team wraps a successful monthlong
marathon of validation,
leaving California with the data to not only check
the current state of PACE, but also develop
new algorithms and data products
for a next-generation look at the ocean and atmosphere all over the globe.