Today two flights over Po Valley and Rome, measuring black carbon and atmospheric pollution
The ACTRIS-2 field campaign (http://actris-cimone.isac.cnr.it/) started on July 3rd achieves today one of the main goals: the study of the vertical distribution of the aerosol particles over the Po Valley. For that purpose a microLiDAR is running in San Pietro Capofiume since the beginning of the campaign and today the ultra-light aircraft from GreenLight (http://www.worldgreenflight.com/) will take off a journey inside and over the blanket of pollutants covering Po Valley. The aircraft, equipped with a new instrument which provides accurate data about black carbon and carbon dioxide concentration, will complete three vertical profiles over the three sites of the campaign: San Pietro Capofiume, Bologna and Monte Cimone.
Moreover the second HALO aircraft flight over Italy (first flight here:http://www.isac.cnr.it/en/content/cnr-isac-involved-emerge-campaign/) during the operational phase of the EMeRGe project (Effect of Megacities on the transport and transformation of pollutants on the Regional and Global scales, http://www.iup.uni-bremen.de/emerge/home/home.html/) will take off at 9UTC from Germany to enable flight downwind of the Po Valley in the late morning and in the afternoon over Rome. The flight measurements are focused on catching the outflow of pollution from the polluted areas of Po Valley and Rome. ISAC Rome provides support to this project with complete simultaneous measurements of near surface and columnar/vertical profiles of aerosol properties, with both lidars and ceilometers. (http://www.iup.uni-bremen.de/emerge/home/support_CNR-ISAC.html/).
Figure 1. The routes of the flights providing atmospheric observations