Earth Science Project Office
ARCTAS Home Page
Arctic Research of the Composition of the Troposphere from Aircraft and Satellites.
The Arctic is a beacon of global change. It is where warming has been strongest over the past century, accelerating over the past decades. It is an atmospheric receptor of pollution from the northern midlatitudes continents, as manifested in particular by thick aerosol layers ("arctic haze") and by accumulation of persistent pollutants such as mercury.
It is increasingly beset by emissions from massive forest fires in boreal Eurasia and North America. Perturbations to the arctic environment trigger unique regional responses including melting of ice sheets and permafrost, decrease in snow albedo due to deposition of black carbon,and halogen radical chemistry from sea salt aerosols deposited to the ice.
These responses make the Arctic a particularly vulnerable place, subject to dramatic amplification of environmental change with possibly global consequences. The urgent need for research to better understand changes in arctic atmospheric composition and climate is discussed by the Arctic Climate Impact Assessment (http://amap.no/acia/ ) and the U. S. Global Change Research Program (http://www.usgcrp.gov). Major research activities to address this need will take place in 2007 - 2008 under the auspices of the Third International Polar Year (IPY; http://www.ipy.org/ ).
ARCTAS is part of a larger interagency and international IPY effort collectively identified as POLARCAT.
ESPO News:
ARCTAS - Spring deployment successfully concluded; We are looking forward to the summer deployment in Cold Lake, Canada.
Discovery.com ARCTAS blog
ESPO supports joint NOAA/NASA/NSF science mission GasEx.
TC4 Deployment in Costa Rica successfully concluded on August 12th. DC-8, ER-2 and WB-57 have flown a total of 25 flights. 292 weather balloons were launched from Galapagos, Panama and Costa Rica. DC-8 launched 93 dropsondes.
