Atmospheric aerosol, gases and meteorological parameters measured during the LAPSE-RATE campaign

Abstract. Small Unmanned Aerial Systems (sUAS) are becoming very popular as affordable and reliable observation platforms. The Lower Atmospheric Process Studies at Elevation - a Remotely-piloted Aircraft Team Experiment (LAPSE-RATE), conducted in the San Luis Valley of Colorado (USA) between July 14th – 20th, 2018, gathered together numerous sUAS, remote sensing equipment and ground based instrumentation. Flight teams from the Finnish Meteorological Institute and the Kansas State University co-operated during LAPSE-RATE to measure and investigate the properties of aerosol particles and gases at the surface and in the lower atmosphere. During LAPSE-RATE the deployed instrumentation operated reliably, resulting in a scientifically sound observational dataset. Our observations included aerosol particle number concentrations and size distributions, concentrations of CO₂ and water vapor, and meteorological parameters. All data sets have been uploaded to the Zenodo LAPSE-RATE community archive (https://zenodo.org/communities/lapse-rate/). The dataset DOIs for FMI airborne measurements and surface measurements are available here: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.3993996, Brus et al. (2020a), and for KSU airborne measurements and surface measurements are available here: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.3736772, Brus et al. (2020b).