Three spectrometers will be deployed in the greater Houston area from May through September 2022 as a part of the greater TRACER campaign. These Fourier transform near-infrared (FTIR) spectrometers (Bruker EM27/SUNs) gather total-column data of trace gases including two primary greenhouse gases, carbon dioxide, and methane, along with carbon monoxide. These spectrometers will be collocated with a variety of trace gas, aerosol, and boundary-layer instruments with the primary goal of gathering information about anthropogenic emissions from the city and industrial point sources. Deployments will be aligned with OCO-2 and OCO-3 flights for the purpose of satellite validation. Several sites in the Houston area will be used at various times to focus on different scientific goals. Local pollutant concentration and rural-to-urban gradients of pollutants will be analyzed. Sea breeze impact on trace gas transport, coastal meteorology, boundary-layer conditions, and local source/sink terms will be analyzed to determine their impact on the data collected.

Additional Information

Data Plan

The University of Oklahoma GeoCarb Group anticipates collecting data at multiple sites including the three ARM TRACER sites (La Porte, CSAPR, and Ancillary) between May 23, 2022, and September 17, 2022. During this time, we will deploy between one and three EM27/SUN instruments. Two of these instruments are guest EM27s and will need to be co-deployed with the GeoCarb EM27 upon arrival in Houston for a minimum of two days. After co-deployment, each EM27 will move to its own site, depending on the meteorological conditions and deployment objective.

Raw data from each EM27 will need to be run through retrievals before sending data to ARM. Data transfer from instruments and data processing will be handled exclusively by our group, and final processed data will be provided to the ARM Data Center. Data processing will take a minimum of one week after collection, but likely closer to one month due to reliance of other data sets.

Processed data for a single-day deployment should be less than 300 KB. All instruments will likely be deployed manually during this campaign. For a manual deployment, the instrument will be set up each morning, and taken down each night. Daily deployments will depend on whether personnel are available to deploy the instrument and if the weather conditions are sufficient. Therefore, it is difficult to estimate the number of days we will deploy. At most, processed data is estimated to occupy 106200 KB. The point of contact for all data products is Elizabeth Spicer (easpicer@ou.edu).

Data structures from each EM27/SUN deployment will be provided in either text file or NetCDF format. We anticipate abiding by the following file naming convention: SiteCode<YY><MM><DD>_InstrumentName.*

Timeline