14 DAY TRIAL // Officials with the American space agency announced recently that the 2014 Airborne Tropical Tropopause Experiment (ATTREX) concluded successfully on March 14. This mission was part of a multi-year science campaign aimed at better understanding the tropopause, one of the most mysterious layers of Earth's atmosphere.
The research was made using scientific instruments installed aboard a NASA Global Hawk unmanned aerial system (UAS), which carried out several flights from the Andersen Air Force Base on Guam Island, in the western Pacific. All scientific tools on the aircraft are designed to offer a glimpse into the inner workings of the upper atmosphere.
The overarching goal of the ATTREX campaign is to figure out how these changes will affect our planet's climate in the long run, especially in combination with greenhouse and ozone-depleting gases. This year's leg of the mission began on February 13 and lasted for a full month. The Global Hawk returned home early on Friday morning, March 14.
The aircraft landed at the NASA Armstrong Flight Research Center, which is located at the Edwards Air Force Base, in California. The Global Hawk carried out a total of seven long-duration science flights, for a grand total of 121 hours spent in the air. ATTREX has until now logged 297 flight hours.
“The western Pacific region is critical for establishing the humidity of the air entering the stratosphere,” explained the principal investigator for ATTREX, Eric Jensen. The expert holds an appointment with the NASA Ames Research Center (ARC) in Moffett Field, California. The 13 research instruments on Global Hawk 872 helped the team collect sufficient data from this year to support the ATTREX effort.
By obtaining a better understanding of the physical processes taking place in the upper reaches of the lowest layers in Earth's atmosphere, scientists hope to soon be able to produce accurate weather and climate predictions. This will come in handy when politicians finally decide to tackle the growing concern that is global warming.
ATTREX instruments measure both moisture levels and the chemical composition of particles in these layers of the atmosphere. Each year, such data is added to a growing database, which is meant to eventually provide support for other similar investigations or for upcoming climate satellites.
Over the years, climate scientists have determined that even slight changes in the chemistry and amount of water vapors in Earth's stratosphere can have significant and immediate effects on planetary climates. However, the exact processes through which this happens remain largely mysterious. Due to experiments such as ATTREX, this may not remain the case for long.