TOPAZ Data

August 3, 2016

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Daily Summary:

Wednesday, August 3: CABOTS IOP2
Day 17 of CABOTS IOP 2 observations. TOPAZ data were taken from 09:16 to 18:36 PDT. Hot with an offical high of 38C (100F) at the airport met tower. Cloud-free overhead all day, some Cu clouds over the Sierra crest. Very hazy. The Sierra Foothills were invisible all day. South-southeasterly surface winds until 1100 PDT, then veering to a westerly direction and becoming weaker. Surface ozone increased throughout the day, peaked in the low 70s ppbv* around 1800 PDT, and decreased after that. The BL grew to about 700 m AGL. The TOPAZ aerosol backsactter data show many smoke layers aloft between 1000 and 2500 m AGL thru 1700 PDT, after which the lower free troposphere cleared out except for a thin layer around 2500 m AGL. The aerosol layers varied in thickness from 800 to only a few 10s of meters and contained very high aerosol concentrations. The TOPAZ ozone data also show a complex, layered structure in the lowest 2500 m. (Note: The extremely strong aerosol gradients that were observed today may have caused biases in the ozone retrieval at the layer interfaces, e.g. near 1200 m AGL around midday and around 2200 m AGL.) Just as on the previous days, TOPAZ detected fairly high ozone values of 80 to 90 ppbv above 5 km AGL.