Aerosol and chemical transport in tropical convection (ACTIVE): first campaign log

Summaries of flights, instrument usage and Met conditions during the ACTIVE campaigns. ACTIVE ("Aerosol and chemical transport in tropical convection") was a NERC-funded consortium project combining field measurements and a range of modelling tools at different scales to address questions related to the composition of the tropical tropopause layer (TTL), that is, the upper tropical troposphere. Field measurements were conducted in Darwin, Australia in two phases: November-December 2005 (pre-monsoon convection), in collaboration with the SCOUT-O3 project funded by the European Commission, and January-February 2006 (monsoon convection), in collaboration with the US/Australian TWPICE project. ACTIVE utilised the Australian Egrett aircraft operated by ARA and the NERC Dornier 228 operated by the British ARSF to measure chemical species and aerosol in the inflow and outflow of tropical storms. Cloud-scale and large-scale modelling studies assisted in the interpretation of the measurements to distinguish the different contributions to the TTL composition