Costa Rica Aura Validation Experiment

During January-February 2006, The NASA GSFC group was involved in the Costa Rica Aura Validation Experiment (CR-AVE). AVE is a series of flights designed to provide validation data for the Aura satellite. CR-AVE was flown aboard the NASA WB-57f flying out of Ellington Field and San Juan Santamaria airport in San Jose, Costa Rica. Information on the flights and instruments can be found on the official web site: http://cloud1.arc.nasa.gov/ave-costarica2/.

Leslie Lait put together a forecast web site for the mission. These forecasts were used as flight planning tools for the operation of the WB-57 from Ellington field.

The GSFC Atmospheric Compact Atmospheric Mapper (ACAM) was flown in this campaign. ACAM is composed of a forward looking camera from the WB-57 cockpit, a nadir (downward) viewing camera on the wing, and two UV-Vis spectrometers that are combined with the nadir camera. ACAM was initially conceived in February 2005 and was flown in June 2005. Scott Janz is the PI on ACAM. You can see time-lapse movies of the ACAM images on the ACAM web site. The raw ACAM imagery can be obtained from the AVDC web site.

• Pictures.
• Flight Tracks.
• Back trajectories of flight data.

Last Updated: 2006-02-27
Author: Dr. Paul A. Newman (NASA/GSFC, Code 916) (newman@notus.gsfc.nasa.gov)
Responsible NASA organization/official: Dr. Paul A. Newman, Atmospheric Chemistry and Dynamics Branch