RIALTO Routine Inflight Assessment of Lower Tropospheric Oxidants

CAST OF PLAYERS Gerd Hoenninger Wes Kobelka Jim Arnold Johnny Lai Stoyka Netcheva John Dalziel Jan Bottenheim

“DO YOU HAVE DATA?” (Keith Puckett, October )

 miniature, low power/low volume instrument package  no compromise in data quality, no lower grade instrumentation  must operate in fully automated mode  installation in small aircraft already in service RIALTO, concept

2B: temperature sensitivity is a problem, currently work in progress to ameliorate the problem (appears in part due to temperature sensitive voltage regulators PROBLEM MORE SERIOUS THAN INITIALLY EXPECTED. ONGOING on board ozone source to be added for inflight test of operation DONE data storage on PC104+ system DONE ISSUES LAST YEAR

DOAS: 2 optical windows; these windows will connect to 2 small lenses inside the nose cone and the light will be transmitted to the 2 spectrometers using quartz fibers; icing precautions still to be addressed DONE 2 MiniDOAS devices to be installed in nose cone DONE 1 PC104+ system for data acquisition and storage. Flash disks will be used for data storage and backup. DONE small sealed lead gel battery will be used to guarantee safe shutdown without data loss DONE system can start automatically when aircraft power is switched on OPERATIONAL it will be attempted to have zentih and horizontal viewing direction instead of zenith and nadir. To determine the feasability some general data or statistics on flight altitudes will be used. CHANGED TO TWO ANGLES HORIZONTAL (SIDEWAYS) AT 10 0 DIFFERENCE

Other: position, temperature, pressure, from avionics system LOGGING AIRCRAFT GPS DATA FOR TIME, POSITION, AND ALTITUDE room for potential other parameters: CO? CO2? aerosol? Suggestions please! NOT ATTEMPTED all data to be collected on flash card; reader to be installed in cockpit; all other parts in nose-cone DONE fully automated operation using 28 VDC from aircraft DONE

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1.2B: slow starting inflight zero/span check not implemented temperature and pressure problems, not related to spectroscopy 2.DOAS: no spectra analyzed to date due to cooling problems 3.Humidity sensor: not working until now (replaced October 14) 4.Communications from aircraft GPS: unreliable serial connection 5.Overheating of nosecone 6.Weight of total package too high: frequently package removed from the plane

RIALTO NEXT STEPS 2B, major overhaul lamp stability preheating of lamp housing fast data logging Complete redesign of packaging compacter better temperature control reduced weight Data analysis software improvements to SPI data archiving (MS Access?) $$$$$$$$ OK until end FY pending PAL compensation PDF when Gerd leaves?