BAECCSONDE

Modified meteorological radiosondes have been extensively developed at the University of Reading for measuring cloud properties, to allow measurements beyond the traditional thermodynamic quantities (pressure temperature and relative humidity (RH)) to be obtained cost-effectively. Sensors developed at Reading include a supercooled liquid water sensor, an active cloud droplet detector, solar radiation sensor, electrical cloud charge detector, and turbulence sensor. These sensors are interfaced to a standard Vaisala RS92 meteorological radiosonde by a specially developed data acquisition system, PANDORA (Harrison et al, 2012) which allows the extra sensor data to be sent synchronously with the pressure, temperature and RH data across the radio link, without the need for any extra hardware at the receiving station. Evaluation of these new balloon borne sensors is required, which can be provided by active remote-sensing in the form of radar and lidar. This extended IOP sought to investigate a number of cloud processes in which in-situ cloud observations from radiosondes could provide information either complementary to or not obtainable by lidar/radar systems including detection of supercooled liquid water, investigation of electrical charging of cloud droplets in stratiform clouds, detection of cloud layers missed by lidar/radar, and characterisation of in cloud turbulence. This experiment was performed at the Hyytiälä site in Finland, during the same period when the US DoE Atmospheric Radiation Measurement (ARM) program was deployed. The provision of this comprehensive remote-sensing dataset, coupled with the existence of a radiosonde launching system at the ARM mobile facility therefore provided the best possible chance for evaluating the new radiosonde cloud and charge sensors. In turn, the new radiosonde cloud sensors also permitted the evaluation/validation of new remote-sensing retrievals.

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