University of Colorado and Black Swift Technologies RPAS-based measurements of the lower atmosphere during LAPSE-RATE

Abstract

Abstract. Between 14 and 20\xa0July\xa02018, small remotely piloted aircraft\nsystems (RPASs) were deployed to the San Luis Valley of Colorado (USA)\ntogether with a variety of surface-based remote and in situ sensors as well as\nradiosonde systems as part of the Lower Atmospheric Profiling Studies at\nElevation – a Remotely-piloted Aircraft Team Experiment (LAPSE-RATE). The\nobservations from LAPSE-RATE were aimed at improving our understanding of\nboundary layer structure, cloud and aerosol properties, and\nsurface–atmosphere exchange and provide detailed information to support\nmodel evaluation and improvement work. The current paper describes the\nobservations obtained using four different types of RPASs deployed by the\nUniversity of Colorado Boulder and Black Swift Technologies. These included\nthe DataHawk2, the Talon and the TTwistor (University of Colorado), and the S1 (Black\nSwift Technologies). Together, these aircraft collected over 30\u2009h of\ndata throughout the northern half of the San Luis Valley, sampling altitudes\nbetween the surface and 914\u2009m\u2009a.g.l. Data from these platforms are publicly\navailable through the Zenodo archive and are co-located with other\nLAPSE-RATE data as part of the Zenodo LAPSE-RATE community\n( https://zenodo.org/communities/lapse-rate/ , last access: 27\xa0May\xa02021). The primary DOIs for these\ndatasets are https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.3891620 (DataHawk2, de Boer et al., 2020a, e),\n https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.4096451 (Talon, de Boer et al., 2020d),\n https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.4110626 (TTwistor, de Boer et al., 2020b), and\n https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.3861831 (S1, Elston and Stachura, 2020).