Search NASA⌕ Search

SEARCH · Search NASA

Results for “sailing”

Search indexed NASA NTRS and DOE OSTI research on propulsion, heat transfer, battery materials and energy systems. Follow report and document links to the original sources.

Quote a phrase for an exact phrase match. Source license links do not imply unrestricted reuse.

At least 55 records · Page 3
All sourcesNASA NTRSDOE OSTI
DOE OSTI2021

Surface Atmosphere Integrated Field Laboratory (SAIL) Science Plan

Mountains are the natural water towers of the world, effectively turning water vapor into readily available fresh water through precipitation, snowpack, and runoff. Unfortunately, Earth system models (ESMs) have persistently been unable to predict the timing and availability of water resources from mountains because the source(s) of model error are difficult to isolate in complex terrain with limited atmospheric or land-surface observations. Further complications arise from the gross scale mismatch between ESM grid box sizes and the relevant scales of mountainous hydrological processes. The mountain hydrometeorology community has repeatedly called for integrated atmospheric and land observations of water and energy budgets in complex terrain that span these scales to establish benchmarks against which scale-dependent models can be further developed.

54 ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES↗
DOE OSTI2021

Surface Atmosphere Integrated Field Laboratory (SAIL) Backgrounder

Half of the world relies on water from the mountains, but in a warming world, it is difficult to predict what these resources will look like. The ability to predict future water requires a deep scientific understanding not only of snow and rain, but also of solar and thermal energy, evaporation and transpiration of water, sublimation of snow, impacts of aerosols, and subsurface hydrological processes that control the ultimate discharge from mountainous watersheds.

54 ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES↗
DOE OSTI2023

SAIL Field Campaign X-Band Precipitation Radar Surface Quantitative Precipitation Estimation (SQUIRE) Value-Added Product Report

In 2010, the U.S. Department of Energy Atmospheric Radiation Measurement (ARM) user facility procured 3- and 5-cm wavelength radars for documenting the macrophysical, microphysical, and dynamical structure of precipitating systems. In order to maximize the scientific impact, ARM supported the development of an application chain to correct for various phenomena in order to retrieve the lowest retrieved value on a Cartesian grid. This report details the motivation, science, and progress to date, as well as charting a path forward.

54 ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES↗
DOE OSTI2024

Surface Atmosphere Integrated Field Laboratory (SAIL) (Field Campaign Report)

Mountains are the natural water towers of the world, effectively turning water vapor into readily available fresh water through precipitation, snowpack, and runoff. They contribute disproportionately to precipitation over land, but are under-observed, leading to large gaps in the scientific understanding of convection, extreme precipitation and weather, and interactions between atmospheric circulation, radiation, and land-surface conditions. The mountain hydrometeorology community has repeatedly called for integrated atmospheric and land observations of water and energy budgets in complex terrain that span these scales to establish benchmarks against which scale-dependent models can be further developed.

54 ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES↗
DOE OSTI2023

TWST Cloud Properties (COD, droplet effective radius, and thermodynamic phase). SAIL, AMF2, 2022-2023.

The dataset consists of calibrated zenith shortwave spectral radiances (440-1700 nm) and cloud optical depth (COD) retrievals approximately every second. Retrievals of cloud droplet effective radius and thermodynamic phase are currently done offline, but some of these retrievals are included in the dataset. Effective radius and phase are included for days with periods of sufficiently high COD. Effective radius and phase retrievals in the data set were computed at approximately 5-10 second intervals to reduce computation time. The retrievals can be performed at the full sample rate. The field of view is 0.5 degree.

54 ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES↗
DOE OSTI2023

Leipzig University W-Band Cloud Radar, Gothic (Colorado), SAIL Campaign Second Winter (15.11.2022 - 05.06.2023)

The instrument is a polarimetric W-Band simultaneous transmission simultaneous reception (STSR) Doppler Cloud Radar manufactured by Radiometer Physics GmbH (RPG, instrument type RPG-FMCW-94-DP). It was deployed about 500m away from the ARM M1 facility in Gothic (CO) near the Ore House between Nov 15, 2022 and Jun 5, 2023 at an altitude of 2913 m. The Doppler cloud radar was mounted on a prototype of a cold temperature scanner manufactured by RPG. The dataset contains common radar variables like equivalent radar reflectivity factor, mean Doppler velocity, Doppler spectrum width as well as common polarimetric radar variables like differential phase shift (PhiDP), specific differential phase shift (KDP), correlation coefficient (RHV) and differential reflectivity (ZDR). Between Nov 15, 2022, and Feb 7, 2023 the radar was operated at 40° constant elevation and 151° azimuth (towards the KAZR at the AMF1). Between Feb 7 and Mar 15, 2023 the following scan cycle was repeated in 15min intervals: zenith pointing measurements, RHI scans from 0° to 90° and 90° to 0° elevation at 151° azimuth, constant elevation measurements at 40° elevation and 151° azimuth and PPI scans at 85° elevation for wind retrievals (one PPI per hour). Between Mar 15 18:18 UTC and Apr 8, 2023 11:04 UTC, the scanner was stuck at 72° elevation, which resulted in corrupted files for this period. For that period, the files containing data are uploaded but should be treated with care. Between Apr 8 and Apr 14, 2023 the scanning pattern described above was performed again. Afterwards, except for May 17 and May 18, 2023 where scanning patterns as described above were performed, measurements continued at 40° elevation and 151° azimuth until May 22, 2023 09:00 UTC. The scanning pattern was then started again, but without hourly PPI measurements until May 31, 2023. Between May 31 and Jun 5, 2023 solely zenith-pointing observations were performed. The data provided here are the RPG Level 1 (L1) files, Doppler spectra Level 0 (L0) files are available upon request.

54 ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES↗
DOE OSTI2024

SAIL Storm Boards 2022-2023

“Storm Boards” are simple installations comprised of a horizontal white plastic board that is placed in situ on the surface of the snowpack with a 1 m vertical marker pole for identifying the board center and approximate new snow height. Storm boards allow newly fallen snow to accumulate on them while staying separated from moisture and energy exchange with the snowpack, thus creating a discrete sample of newly fallen snow depth & SWE (snow water equivalent) that can be measured to calculate the net moisture input of individual or multiple storm events to the seasonal snowpack. Samples are measured with a 2” diameter plastic tube that allows the observer to non destructively take a snow core of the newly deposited snow; this core is weighed with a small hand scale - then the mass of the sample is converted to SWE. Depth of the snow sample is obtained with a snow depth probe or from graduated marks on the plastic tube. 3 or more replicate samples are taken for each board measurement and averaged. Total snow height (HS) of the snowpack is measured with a snow depth probe for each site & timepoint to track snowpack accumulation/ablation.

54 ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES↗
DOE OSTI2026

Fluorescent Particle Vertical Profiles (Counts and Fractions) at SAIL

This dataset contains vertically resolved fluorescent aerosol number concentrations and fluorescent fractions of total aerosol number concentrations measured with the ARM Tethered Balloon System during the Surface Atmosphere Integrated Field Laboratory campaign near Gothic, Colorado. Measurements were collected during April and June 2023 as part of the ARM–EMSL FICUS project “Characterization of the Aerobiome during the ARM Surface-Atmosphere Integrated Laboratory Campaign,” which was designed to characterize the vertical distribution of bioaerosol-relevant particles in the Colorado River Basin. The dataset includes profiles of fluorescent particle concentrations measured with a Fluorescent Portable Optical Particle Sizer (FPOPS) in the approximately 0.5–3 µm diameter range. For fluorescent fractions of total aerosol number concentrations, we compare FPOPS measurements to POPS on the same TBS flight.

Fluorescent particle concentration↗
DOE OSTI2023

Electrothermally Driven Reconfiguration of Microrobotic Beam Structures for the ChipSail System

Solar sailing enables efficient propellant-free attitude adjustment and orbital maneuvers of solar sail spacecraft with high area-to-mass ratios. However, the heavy supporting mass for large solar sails inevitably leads to low area-to-mass ratios. Inspired by chip-scale satellites, a chip-scale solar sail system named ChipSail, consisting of microrobotic solar sails and a chip-scale satellite, was proposed in this work. The structural design and reconfigurable mechanisms of an electrothermally driven microrobotic solar sail made of Al\Ni 50 Ti 50 bilayer beams were introduced, and the theoretical model of its electro-thermo-mechanical behaviors was established. The analytical solutions to the out-of-plane deformation of the solar sail structure appeared to be in good agreement with the finite element analysis (FEA) results. A representative prototype of such solar sail structures was fabricated on silicon wafers using surface and bulk microfabrication, followed by an in-situ experiment of its reconfigurable property under controlled electrothermal actuation. The experimental results demonstrated significant electro-thermo-mechanical deformation of such microrobotic bilayer solar sails, showing great potential in the development of the ChipSail system. Analytical solutions to the electro-thermo-mechanical model, as well as the fabrication process and characterization techniques, provided a rapid performance evaluation and optimization of such microrobotic bilayer solar sails for the ChipSail.

77 NANOSCIENCE AND NANOTECHNOLOGY↗
DOE OSTI2025

Investigating Spatial Variability of Aerosol, Cloud Condensation Nuclei, and Ice Nucleating Particles in Mountainous Terrain Field Campaign Report

The U.S. Department of Energy Atmospheric System Research (ASR)-supported Surface Atmosphere Integrated Field Laboratory (SAIL) campaign in the East River Watershed (ERW) of the Upper Colorado River Basin in southwestern Colorado ran from fall 2021 to spring 2023. Two monitoring sites were deployed in the ERW as part of SAIL. The two sites were the Aerosol Observation System (AOS) located on Crested Butte Ski Mountain, and the second ARM Mobile Facility (AMF2), located at the Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory in Gothic, Colorado. To gain a more comprehensive understanding of aerosols in complex, mountainous terrain, Handix Scientific deployed SAIL-Net, a distributed network of six measurement nodes spanning the domain of the SAIL research area from October 2021 to July 2023. Each node measured aerosol particles between 140 nm and 3.4 μm in diameter using a small portable optical particle spectrometer (POPS; Gao et al. 2016), cloud condensation nuclei (CNN) using a miniature CCN counter (CloudPuck), and ice nucleating particles (INP) using the time-resolved aerosol filter sampler (TRAPS; Creamean et al. 2018). Our approach was similar to other studies that aimed to better characterize and understand aerosols and gas-phase pollutants using networks of lower-cost sensors (Caubel et al. 2019, Kelly et al. 2021, Asher et al. 2022). Such studies have identified neighborhood-level variations in pollutant concentrations (Schneider et al. 2017, Popoola et al. 2018, Caubel et al. 2019). Small-scale variations such as this are poorly represented in models and poorly measured by a single monitoring system (Caubel et al. 2019). Previous work has shown the representation error (the ability of measurements to represent a larger area) increases with complex orography, leading to decreases in model accuracy (Schutgens et al. 2017). The overall goal of SAIL-Net was to improve our understanding of the variability of aerosol in the ERW, thus increasing our knowledge of aerosol-cloud interactions in this region and informing the usefulness of distributed networks of measurements for future studies. We met this goal by answering the following science questions: 1. What is the aerosol temporal variability, and how does aerosol inhomogeneity vary seasonally? Is there significant seasonal variability in sources, or are short-term meteorological conditions the most important determining factor in sources for cloud nuclei? 2. What is the aerosol spatial variability? What are the aerosol characteristics at cloud base, presumably the particles most representative of those acting as cloud nuclei? 3. How should measurement networks be designed to capture aerosol-cloud interactions, and what do they need to measure? Can a single measurement site accurately represent aerosol properties in regions of complex terrain? SAIL-Net consisted of six measurement nodes spread across the ERW near Crested Butte, Colorado. The primary objective in site placement was to select locations that captured the vertical variation in aerosol properties while also spanning the domain of the SAIL campaign. The elevation of the sites ranged from roughly 2750 m along the valley floor of the ERW to approximately 3500 m near the top of Crested Butte Mountain, which is one of the taller peaks in the ERW. The farthest distance between sites was 14 km, while the closest two sites were approximately 1 km apart. Two of the sites were collocated with the ARM SAIL sites; our instruments sat on top of one of the trailers at AOS and another one of our sites was located in a meadow just above AMF2.

54 ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES↗
DOE OSTI2024

Investigating spatial variability of aerosol, cloud condensation nuclei, and ice nucleating particles in mountainous terrain

The ASR-supported Surface Atmosphere Integrated field Laboratory (SAIL) in the East River Watershed (ERW) of the Upper Colorado River Basin in southwestern Colorado ran from fall 2021 to spring 2023. Two monitoring sites were deployed in the East River Watershed as part of SAIL. The two sites were the Aerosol Observation System (AOS) located on Crested Butte Ski Mountain, and the ARM Mobile Facility (AMF-2), located at the Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory in Gothic, Colorado. To gain a more comprehensive understanding of aerosols in complex, mountainous terrain, Handix Scientific deployed SAIL-Net, a distributed network of six measurement nodes spanning the domain of the SAIL research area from October 2021 to July 2023. Each node measured aerosol particles between 140 nm and 3.4 μm in diameter using a small particle counter (POPS, (Gao et al., 2016)), CNN using a miniature CCN counter (CloudPuck), and INP using the Time-Resolved Aerosol Filter Sampler (TRAPS, Creamean et al. (2018)). Our approach was similar to other studies that aimed to better characterize and understand aerosols and gas-phase pollutants using networks of lower-cost sensors (Caubel et al., 2019; Kelly et al., 2021; Asher et al., 2022). Such studies have identified neighborhood-level variations in pollutant concentrations (Schneider et al., 2017; Popoola et al., 2018; Caubel et al., 2019). Small-scale variations such as this are poorly represented in models and poorly measured by a single monitoring system (Caubel et al., 2019). Previous work has shown the representation error (the ability of measurements to represent a larger area) increases with complex orography, leading to decreases in model accuracy (Schutgens et al., 2017). The overall goal of SAIL-Net was to improve our understanding of the variability of aerosol in ERW, thus increasing our knowledge of aerosol-cloud interactions in this region and informing the usefulness of distributed networks of measurements for future studies.

54 ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES↗
DOE OSTI2020

Surface Atmosphere Integrated Field Laboratory

To help improve understanding and modeling of processes connected to mountain hydrology, the Atmospheric Radiation Measurement (ARM) user facility will operate the Surface Atmosphere Integrated Field Laboratory (SAIL) field campaign in central Colorado. From September 2021 to June 2023, an ARM Mobile Facility will collect measurements with a focus on the 300-square-kilometer (116-square-mile) East River Watershed within the Upper Colorado River Basin. SAIL will combine atmospheric measurements from ARM, a U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) scientific user facility, with existing surface and subsurface data from partner research organizations. Researchers will develop detailed measurements of mountainous water-cycle processes as they pertain to the Colorado River, which supplies water for 40 million people in the American West. Through SAIL, researchers from DOE national laboratories, universities, and research centers and agencies will enable an atmosphere-through-bedrock understanding of mountainous water cycles. By observing what is happening above and below ground to influence hydrology at various scales across the East River Watershed, SAIL will provide insights into how Upper Colorado River watersheds interact with the atmosphere to produce water.

54 ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES↗
DOE OSTI2026

Surface Quantitative Precipitation Estimates (SQUIRE) of Snow Water Equivalent from the Surface Atmospheric Integrated Field Laboratory

The upper Colorado River basin is the primary source of water for 40 million people. With declining snowpack in the basin, forecasting hydrological budgets in the Southwest United States is more important than ever. However, due in part, to a lack of reliable observations of precipitation in complex terrain, hydrological models struggle to assess and forecast snowpack snow water equivalent (SWE) in the upper Colorado River basin (UCRB). Therefore, the need for more reliable SWE forecasts in the UCRB motivated the U.S. Department of Energy Atmospheric Radiation Measurement Facility’s Surface Atmospheric Integrated Field Laboratory (SAIL) that occurred from June 2021 to June 2023. During SAIL, the X-band precipitation radar from Colorado State University conducted volume scans sampling the precipitation properties over the UCRB. The ARM facility developed a gridded Surface Quantitative Precipitation Estimates (SQUIRE) product from the radar observations. To do this, various daily SWE estimates from radar using the radar reflectivity factor Z e and specific differential phase K dp were compared against ground-based precipitation gauges. SWE in precipitation calculated from Wolfe and Snider’s S–Z e estimator was in best agreement with the rain gauges for the days when SWE < 12 mm. For days with SWE > 12 mm, the WSR-88D Intermountain West relationship had the best agreement with the precipitation gauges. Airborne snow depth observations show that SQUIRE captures regions of orographic enhancement in the mountains to the west and northwest of the SAIL study area, indicating that the scientific community should focus on understanding and ultimately simulating orographic atmospheric precipitation processes to improve UCRB snowpack SWE assessment and forecasting.

Hydrology↗
DOE OSTI2022

2021 Annual Report: Atmospheric Radiation Measurement

In fiscal year 2021 (FY2021), the COVID-19 pandemic continued to have an impact on activities within the Atmospheric Radiation Measurement (ARM) user facility. Travel was limited, which affected field activities and forced the continuation of virtual meetings. However, the ability to travel expanded significantly through the year, bringing some return to normalcy, and throughout the year, there was a great deal of activity dedicated to advancing the facility. Because of COVID, ARM twice delayed the TRacking Aerosol Convection interactions ExpeRiment (TRACER) in the Houston, Texas, area. Originally planned to launch in the spring, TRACER started October 1, 2021, one month after the Surface Atmosphere Integrated Field Laboratory (SAIL) campaign began near Crested Butte, Colorado. ARM teams worked onsite and remotely to make sure both campaigns could launch on this new schedule that was set early in the year. Data from SAIL and TRACER will be critical to improving earth system models, each contributing to different sets of issues. SAIL measurements will provide insights into how precipitation forms and water travels through the Upper Colorado River Basin. TRACER scientists want to know whether tiny atmospheric particles can influence the severity of thunderstorms. In October 2020, the Multidisciplinary Drifting Observatory for the Study of Arctic Climate (MOSAiC) expedition ended after 13 months. MOSAiC data from ARM and other organizations are already helping scientists better understand how ice, atmosphere, and ocean systems are connected in the central Arctic. This report discusses some early investigations from MOSAiC, along with other ARM campaigns and activities generating prolific research. In this report, you will also learn how research activities moved forward during the pandemic at ARM’s fixed-location atmospheric observatories. There were important science applications from measurements across the facility. ARM spent a significant amount of FY2021 looking back—and ahead. In November 2020, ARM had its Triennial Review. This review is held every three years to evaluate ARM’s effectiveness in science, operations, and management. Overall, the reviewers had positive feedback regarding the breadth and impact of science activities using ARM data and the way ARM strives to meet changing user needs. The reviewers also provided some recommendations for strengthening ARM going forward. Incorporating feedback from the review, we finalized an updated Decadal Vision document that will help guide ARM priorities in the coming years. This report describes the four themes driving ARM’s Decadal Vision.

54 ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES↗