A comprehensive in situ and remote sensing data set collected during the HALO–(AC) 3 aircraft campaign

Abstract

The HALO-(AC)3 aircraft campaign was carried out in March and April 2022 over the Norwegian and Greenland seas, the Fram Strait, and the central Arctic Ocean. Three research aircraft - the High Altitude and Long Range Research Aircraft (HALO), Polar 5, and Polar 6 - performed 54 partly coordinated research flights on 23 flight days over areas of open ocean, the marginal sea ice zone (MIZ), and the central Arctic sea ice. The general objective of the research flights was to quantify the evolution of air mass properties during moist and warm-air intrusions (WAIs) and cold-air outbreaks (CAOs). To obtain a comprehensive data set, the three aircraft operated following different strategies. HALO was equipped with active and passive remote sensing instruments and dropsondes to cover the regional evolution of cloud and thermodynamic processes. Polar 5 carried a similar remote sensing payload to HALO, and Polar 6 was instrumented with in situ cloud, aerosol, and trace gas instruments focusing on the initial air mass transformation close to the MIZ. The processed, calibrated, and validated data are published in the World Data Center PANGAEA as instrument-separated data subsets and listed in aircraft-separated collections for HALO (Ehrlich et al., 2024a, https://doi.org/10.1594/PANGAEA.968885), Polar 5 (Mech et al., 2024a, https://doi.org/10.1594/PANGAEA.968883), and Polar 6 (Herber et al., 2024, https://doi.org/10.1594/PANGAEA.968884). A detailed overview of the available data sets is provided here. Furthermore, the campaign-specific instrument setup, the data processing, and quality are summarized. Based on measurements conducted during a specific CAO, it is shown that the scientific analysis of the HALO-(AC)3 data benefits from the coordinated operation of the three aircraft.