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ATom: Aircraft Flight Track and Navigational Data

Metadata Updated: December 6, 2023

This dataset provides flight track and aircraft navigation data from the NASA Atmospheric Tomography Mission (ATom). Flight track information is available for the four ATom campaigns: ATom-1, ATom-2, ATom-3, and ATom-4. Each ATom campaign consists of multiple individual flights and flight navigational information is recorded in 10-second intervals. Data available for each flight includes research flight number, date, and start and stop time of each 10-second interval. In addition, latitude, longitude, altitude, pressure and temperature is included at each 10-second interval. NASA's ATom campaign deploys an extensive gas and aerosol payload on the NASA DC-8 aircraft for systematic, global-scale sampling of the atmosphere, profiling continuously from 0.2 to 12 km altitude. Flights occurred in each of 4 seasons from 2016 to 2018. During each campaign, flights originate from the Armstrong Flight Research Center in Palmdale, California, fly north to the western Arctic, south to the South Pacific, east to the Atlantic, north to Greenland, and return to California across central North America. ATom establishes a single, contiguous, global-scale dataset. One intended use of this flight track data is to facilitate to mapping model results from global models onto the precise ATom flight tracks for comparison.

Access & Use Information

Public: This dataset is intended for public access and use. License: No license information was provided. If this work was prepared by an officer or employee of the United States government as part of that person's official duties it is considered a U.S. Government Work.

Downloads & Resources

Dates

Metadata Created Date May 30, 2023
Metadata Updated Date December 6, 2023

Metadata Source

Harvested from NASA Data.json

Graphic Preview

Figure 1:  Flight tracks KML file displayed in Google Earth showing part of the flight path and 10 second interval points for Flight 5 flown on August 8, 2016 of the ATom1 campaign.  The elevation profile of the entire flight is shown on the bottom pane.

Additional Metadata

Resource Type Dataset
Metadata Created Date May 30, 2023
Metadata Updated Date December 6, 2023
Publisher ORNL_DAAC
Maintainer
Identifier C2675823486-ORNL_CLOUD
Data First Published 2018-09-06
Language en-US
Data Last Modified 2023-06-12
Category ATom, geospatial
Public Access Level public
Bureau Code 026:00
Metadata Context https://project-open-data.cio.gov/v1.1/schema/catalog.jsonld
Metadata Catalog ID https://data.nasa.gov/data.json
Schema Version https://project-open-data.cio.gov/v1.1/schema
Catalog Describedby https://project-open-data.cio.gov/v1.1/schema/catalog.json
Citation Wofsy, S.C., and ATom Science Team. 2018. ATom: Aircraft Flight Track and Navigational Data. ORNL DAAC, Oak Ridge, Tennessee, USA. https://doi.org/10.3334/ORNLDAAC/1613
Graphic Preview Description Figure 1: Flight tracks KML file displayed in Google Earth showing part of the flight path and 10 second interval points for Flight 5 flown on August 8, 2016 of the ATom1 campaign. The elevation profile of the entire flight is shown on the bottom pane.
Graphic Preview File https://daac.ornl.gov/ATOM/guides/ATom_nav_Fig1.png
Harvest Object Id 206ad21b-7c83-4e35-8d87-420651750a44
Harvest Source Id 58f92550-7a01-4f00-b1b2-8dc953bd598f
Harvest Source Title NASA Data.json
Homepage URL https://doi.org/10.3334/ORNLDAAC/1613
Metadata Type geospatial
Old Spatial -180.0 -86.18 180.0 82.94
Program Code 026:001
Source Datajson Identifier True
Source Hash 7f3fa6b4b349107da2890ac4dcbf8fb5a0e45f6ef203e57cace21b7d6ff508d8
Source Schema Version 1.1
Spatial
Temporal 2016-07-29T00:00:00Z/2018-05-21T23:59:59Z

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