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When: 2 February - 28 March 2023
Where: Ellington Field, Houston, Texas, USA and Eielson Air Force Base, Fairbanks, Alaska, USA
How: NASA WB-57 Payload
The first science mission of the NOAA SABRE project, dubbed Cold SABRE, conducted 12 research flights out of Eielson AFB, Fairbanks, Alaska, to investigate aerosol properties and processes in the late winter Arctic stratosphere. The primary mission objective was to sample a range of air masses at high latitude in the Northern Hemisphere stratosphere, including the aged air of the Arctic polar vortex.
The large-scale global air circulation pattern in the stratosphere is known as the Brewer-Dobson circulation. Once in the stratosphere, air moves north or south towards the poles as it descends. The descending portion of the upper branch of the stratospheric Brewer-Dobson circulation occurs at high latitudes, primarily at the winter pole. The mean age of air in the winter polar vortex is ~5 years since it crossed the tropopause and thus is some of the oldest air in the stratosphere, having undergone extensive chemical aging and atmospheric processing.
The tropopause at polar latitudes is relatively low, which allows a high altitude research aircraft like the NASA WB-57 to sample air deep into the stratosphere. Sampling within the Arctic polar vortex provides an opportunity to study aged, processed stratospheric air, investigate the role of meteoric smoke particles in influencing the stratospheric aerosol size distribution, and quantify the contribution of surface emissions to the stratospheric aerosol budget.
The Cold SABRE flights included:
Additional lower latitude sampling of the upper troposphere and lower stratosphere from NASA Johnson Space Center's Ellington Field, and on the transit flights between Ellington Field and Eielson AFB, were also conducted. The science flights out of Houston included a southern sortie to survey aerosol and trace gases in the subtropical UTLS; a midlatitude UTLS survey over the central US, and a flight to Cape Canaveral targeting the exhaust plume of a SpaceX Falcon 9 launch.
