Demonstration of an Aircraft System for Real-Time Discrimination & Reporting of Dust, Volcanic Ash, Ice and Super-cooled Water Particles.

This proposal aims to demonstrate an aircraft based measurement and reporting system for in situ real-time discrimination of single coarse dust, ash, super-cooled water and ice particles . The new system will incorporate new single particle polarization detector technology into an existing airborne certified single particle backscatter spectrometer that has been developed for commercial airliners. The target for the demonstrator will initially be the commercial airline industry, with a focus on contributing to civil aircraft safety and Government contingency applications, but it will also serve for global atmospheric research and monitoring applications, e.g. to assist assessment of the impact of aircraft operations on the upper troposphere-lower stratosphere region. It will also improve meteorological information currently broadcast via the World Meteorological Aircraft Meteorological Data Relay (AMDAR) system from commercial aircraft as well as the UK Science community by providing enhanced measurement capability to their research aircraft.

An existing aircraft test bed, the FAAM BAe 146 research aircraft, operated jointly by the UK Meteorological Office and NERC, and which operates under civil aircraft rules, has already been identified for the demonstration/flight validation aspect of the proposed work. An existing measurement system we propose to base the new novel demonstrator on is already flying on this aircraft. We therefore propose to use the FAAM BAe 146 platform to flight validate the new measurement system to minimize costs. The existing system, a miniature non-flow invasive backscatter cloud spectrometer (BCP-100) was developed for the European Research Infrastructure Programme, IAGOS (In-Service Aircraft for Global Observing System), Figure 1. This has already received European Supplemental Type Certification (STC) approval for operation on Airbus A-320 series civil airliners as a component of the IAGOS instrument package programme and this will be expanded to other Airbus types, including A320/40, as IAGOS increases its fleet. The current Airbus platforms with their novel miniature IAGOS instrument packages will also offer a guaranteed future market base for the new system via upgrades and replacements, which will be managed by IAGOS and its extensive links with commercial carriers. Subsequent demonstration of the new system in this high profile environment for both airline safety and improved weather prediction and climate monitoring applications will be used to expand potential market for this system to other aircraft manufacturers with whom IAGOS is already in discussion.

Disruption to livelihood of volcanic ash plumes have had a very significant impact on the UK and its commercial activities recently. The social and economic consequences of such events, episodic though they are, world wide - have become high in the public conscious and a focus for media and government attention and resources. The eruption of the Icelandic volcano Eyjafjallajökull closed airspace all over Europe due to the presence of volcanic ash in the upper atmosphere (up to 55,000 feet). This lead to losses in excess of 1 billion Euros to the European civil aviation industries with equivalent losses due to commercial disruption that resulted. These events lead to headline news stories over prolonged periods and the convening of the governments' civic contingencies committee which struggled to quantify safe fly zones, arguments which rumbled on throughout the year. The high-profile nature of such events has generated many in the aviation industry to seek help from the atmospheric science community to evaluate ash levels using instruments mounted on commercial airliners. This has inspired this project's Impact Plan. This has three levels: 1) a significant and enhanced collaboration with the industrial partner DMT, a world leading developer of aircraft instrumentation,2) maintenance of the UK-NERC contribution to the European IAGOS infrastructure which has extensive links with Arbus Industries and manage the new atmospheric composition monitoring instrument packages now being installed on Lufthansa, Air France and China Airline Airbus which will report on greenhouse gases, aerosols and clouds via the WMO AMDAR system.3) educationally-focussed outreach programme is already in place through EUFAR aimed at research students interested in aircraft based research exemplified by the recent successful Airborne Research for the Environment ICARE-EUFAR, Toulouse, 2010. Through our continued commitment to IAGOS and FAAM instrument development expertise will be delivered to course within this structure. In addition secondary school students will benefit through outreach programmes at the University of Manchester disseminating our findings to encourage greater interest in atmospehric science and instrumentation using airborne platforms to encourage this interest.
This programme will cement collaborations aready in place with FAAM, UK Met Office and NCAS-FGAM. This collaboration will be mutually beneficial. NCAS, and in return the Met Office will be benefiting from valuable data sets, equipment testing and scientific discoveries.