Aerosol Wind Profiler (AWP) WHyMSIE

The Aerosol Wind Profiler (AWP) dataset consists of high spatial and vertical resolution wind profiles. The observations were taken during the joint Westcoast and Heartland Hyperspectral Microwave Sensor Intensive Experiment (WHyMSIE) and Active Passive PBL Profiling Experiment (APEX) field campaigns aboard the G-III aircraft. WHyMSIE aimed to capture a wide variety of thermodynamic, moisture, and planetary boundary layer regimes across a variety of surface types. Comparing hyperspectral microwave retrievals from CoSMIR-H with in situ temperature and humidity information will allow for scientific advancement of remote-sensing techniques into the hyperspectral microwave era and improved understanding of the planetary boundary layer at different measurement scales.
AWP was designed as a new airborne Doppler Wind Lidar (DWL) instrument, using NASA’s 2-micron Wind-Space Pathfinder lidar transceiver. AWP turned this into an airborne wind lidar to provide full three-dimensional wind vector retrievals (Bedka et al. 2024). AWP was designed due to a lack of global wind measurements above Earth’s surface. Conventional 3-D wind profile observations from commercial aircraft, weather radars, microwave profilers, and radiosondes are sparse in space and time (Baker et al. 2014). The 2017 Decadal Survey (National Academies, 2018) notes that existing space-based wind measurements do not provide the detail and precision to resolve key processes, especially in the vertical dimension, and states a need for new orbital wind profilers in the 2017-2027 decadal timeframe. The instrument is designed to provide high resolution retrievals to fill in the gaps for upper air wind observations (Hatfield 2025). The AWP dataset files are available from September 20, 2024 through November 15, 2024. The dataset consists of data files in netCDF format. Browse images of the data are available in PNG format.