Coastal Air Pollution (CAP): Atmospheric airborne, surface chemistry and vertical wind profile measurements

The Coastal Air Pollution (CAP) field campaigns in 2009 and 2010 (CAP-2009 and CAP-2010 respectively) sought to investigate the impact of local meteorology on coastal air quality and the structure and evolution of the coastal boundary layer. This dataset consists of surface, tower and airbourne measurements of atmospheric chemistry and vertical wind profiles from the Coastal Air Pollution (CAP) field campaign, led by Dr. Claire Reeves (University of East Anglia, UEA). Airborne measurements were made by instrumentation on board the Facility for Airborne Atmospheric Measurements's (FAAM) BAE 146 aircraft, with surface and tower measurements from the Weybourne Atmospheric Observatory (WAO) and the Facility for Ground-based Atmsopheric Measurements's (FGAM) 1290Mhz mobile wind profiling radar providing vertical profiles of winds, signal to noise ratios and spectral width data. These data were used to investigate the impact of local meteorology on coastal air quality and the structure and evolution of the coastal boundary layer. The objectives of the campaign was to: a) characterise the chemical composition of the air above and around WAO in various meteorological conditions to determine how representative the WAO observations are of the coastal region and of the air-mass origin (esp. in the case of maritime/Arctic air); b) determine the local flow patterns that can be established around WAO which may influence the redistribution of pollutants and to aid future identification of such patterns with the more limited vertical data that is routinely collected at WAO; c) identify patterns that decouple polluted layers from the surface; d) characterise the off-shore pollution sources (ship emissions, emissions from off-shore gas platforms) which impact measurements at WAO under maritime conditions; and, e) provide test cases for the one-dimensional MISTRA model of vertical profiles of trace components in the boundary layer and lower free troposphere, especially providing information about vertical exchange.