This repository provides files describing the different segments or phases of eleven research flights made by the NOAA P3 during the Atlantic Ocean-atmosphere Mesoscale Interaction Campaign, ATOMIC. It follows the flight phase separation for HALO made for the broader EUREC4A experiement.
Flight will be broadly described using four types of segments
- Long ascents or descents, typically at constant heading and nearly constant ascent or descent rate
- A series of straight and level legs, flown at 9000-10000 ft/2.75-3 km, from which AXBTs were deployed.
- A series of level legs, typically from near the surface to above cloud tops, interspersed with altitude changes
- Um, when the plane is flying in a circle. Normally it's dropping sondes.
- Times when the aircraft was not actively engaged in scientific sampling. Some legs may nonetheless provide useful data
Following the HALO flight phase separation we include the label
- An overarching term indicating multiple circles made in a row.
All segments, but especially cloud and transit segments, may also include
- Legs in which aircraft altitude varies minimally
- Legs in which the aircraft is actively ascending or descending
This repo contains a directory of minimal YAML files in describing only the segments from a P3 research flight
during ATOMIC by category (kind), name, time and window (start, end). The script scripts/expand_yaml.py searches this
directory and transform each minimal file into more complete YAML files following the conventions used by HALO.
Takeoff and landing times are inferred from the flight-level summary file in a simple way, Segment time windows are checked against the flight times. Segment IDs are created automatically in the order the segments are provided in the mini-yaml file.
Once the more complete files are created They should be processed with the scripts/utils/attach_sondes.py from the HALO flight phase repo to incorporate the dropsondes from JOANNE. Probably we create AXBT IDs to mirror the sonde IDs and include those too.