UK and USA collaborate in airborne climate science projects

Birmingham scientists are taking part in the first scientific collaboration of its kind, where British and American scientists are trading skills and expertise and are using an unmanned robotic aircraft to gather high altitude atmospheric data. Today ( Friday 25 January) NASA is holding an event at its Dryden Flight Research Center in Southern California to showcase a number of Earth science missions to study climate change and air pollution. One of the NASA campaigns, the Airborne Tropical Tropopause Experiment (ATTREX), has a sister campaign just starting in the UK - the Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) CAST project: Coordinated Airborne Studies in the Tropics. The aircraft, a NASA Global Hawk, originally developed for military missions, will explore the tropical tropopause layer, the region where the Earth's air enters the stratosphere. This region is where pollutants and greenhouse gases are transported into and out of the atmosphere and can potentially influence our climate. The scientists will be studying these chemical and climate interactions, and will aim to discover how much of the gas moves up into storms, something we have very little knowledge of at present. The science teams will programme the Global Hawk to fly into the most climate-sensitive and difficult to reach regions close to the equator, at an altitude of around 20km (approx. 65,600 feet) above the Earth - around twice the height of a commercial passenger jet.