ALBERT

Description: In-flight studies of the overall and local components of drag of many types of aircraft were conducted. The primary goal of these studies was to evaluate wind-tunnel and semiempirical prediction methods. Some evaluations are presented in this paper which may be summarized by the following observations: Wind-tunnel predictions of overall vehicle drag can be accurately extrapolated to flight Reynolds numbers, provided that the base drag is removed and the boattail areas on the vehicle are small. The addition of ablated roughness to lifting body configurations causes larger losses in performance and stability than would be expected from the added friction drag due to the roughness. Successful measurements of skin friction have been made in flight to Mach numbers above 4. A reliable inflatable deceleration device was demonstrated in flight which effectively stabilizes and decelerates a lifting aircraft at supersonic speeds.

Description: Monthly zonal mean observations of H2O and CH4 made by the limb infrared monitor of the stratosphere and the stratospheric and mesospheric sounder instruments on Nimbus 7 have been used to investigate whether the H2O mixing ratios in the stratosphere are consistent with a source via the oxidation of CH4. While both sets of data show considerable seasonally varying structure, total hydrogen (neglecting molecular hydrogen) is relatively featureless with a mean value over the stratosphere of 6.0 + or - 0.35 ppmm(1sigma) for the five-month period studied. The uniformity of the total hydrogen fields points to the validity of the CH4 oxidation hypothesis. The derived fields of total hydrogen are used to deduce a mean H2O mixing ratio for air as it enters the stratosphere of 2.7 + or - 0.35 ppmv (1sigma) from which a desiccation temperature may be deduced.

Description: We demonstrate how observations of N2O and mean age in the tropical and midlatitude lower stratosphere (LS) can be used to identify realistic transport in models. The results are applied to 15 Chemistry Climate Models (CCMs) participating in the 2010 WMO assessment. Comparison of the observed and simulated N2O/mean age relationship identifies models with fast or slow circulations and reveals details of model ascent and tropical isolation. The use of this process-oriented N2O/mean age diagnostic identifies models with compensating transport deficiencies that produce fortuitous agreement with mean age. We compare the diagnosed model transport behavior with a model's ability to produce realistic LS O3 profiles in the tropics and midlatitudes. Models with the greatest tropical transport problems show the poorest agreement with observations. Models with the most realistic LS transport agree more closely with LS observations and each other. We incorporate the results of the chemistry evaluations in the SPARC CCMVal Report (2010) to explain the range of CCM predictions for the return-to-1980 dates for global (60 S-60 N) and Antarctic column ozone. Later (earlier) Antarctic return dates are generally correlated to higher (lower) vortex Cl(sub y) levels in the LS, and vortex Cl(sub y) is generally correlated with the model's circulation although model Cl(sub y) chemistry or Cl(sub y) conservation can have a significant effect. In both regions, models that have good LS transport produce a smaller range of predictions for the return-to-1980 ozone values. This study suggests that the current range of predicted return dates is unnecessarily large due to identifiable model transport deficiencies.

Description: A magnetic direction-finding network for the detection of lightning cloud-to-ground strikes has been installed along the east coast of the United States. Most of the lightning occurring from Maine to Florida and as far west as Ohio is detected. Time, location, flash polarity, stroke count, and peak signal amplitude are recorded in real time. Flash locations, time, and polarity are displayed routinely for research and operational purposes. Flash density maps have been generated for the summers of 1983 and 1984, when the network only extended to North Carolina, and show density maxima in northern Virginia and Maryland.

Description: The correlation between measured tropospheric ozone (O3) and carbon monoxide (CO) has been used extensively in tropospheric chemistry studies to explore the photochemical characteristics of different regions and to evaluate the ability of models to capture these characteristics. Here, we present the first study that uses multi-year, global, vertically resolved, simultaneous and collocated O3 and CO satellite (Tropospheric Emission Spectrometer) measurements, to determine this correlation in the middle/lower free troposphere for two different seasons, and to evaluate two chemistry-climate models. We find results that are fairly robust across different years, altitudes and timescales considered, which indicates that the correlation maps presented here could be used in future model evaluations. The highest positive correlations (around 0.8) are found in the northern Pacific during summer, which is a common feature in the observations and the G-PUCCINI model. We make quantitative comparisons between the models using a single-figure metric (C), which we define as the correlation coefficient between the modeled and the observed O3-CO correlations for different regions of the globe. On a global scale, the G-PUCCINI model shows a good performance in the summer (C =0.71) and a satisfactory performance in the winter (C = 0.52). It captures midlatitude features very well, especially in the summer, whereas the performance in regions like South America or Central Africa is weaker. The UKCA model (C = 0.46/0.15 for July-August/December-January on a global scale) performs better in certain regions, such as the tropics in winter, and it captures some of the broad characteristics of summer extratropical correlations, but it systematically underestimates the O3-CO correlations over much of the globe. It is noteworthy that the correlations look very different in the two models, even though the ozone distributions are similar. This demonstrates that this technique provides a powerful global constraint for understanding modeled tropospheric chemical processes. We investigated the sources of the correlations by performing a series of sensitivity experiments. In these, the sign of the correlation is, in most cases, insensitive to removing different individual emissions, but its magnitude changes downwind of emission regions when applying such perturbations. Interestingly, we find that the O3-CO correlation does not solely reflect the strength of O3 photochemical production, as often assumed by earlier studies, but is more complicated and may reflect a mixture of different processes such as transport.

Description: Lift and drag characteristics of HL-10 lifting body during subsonic gliding flight

Description: Flight measurements obtained with a TF-8A airplane modified with a supercritical wing are presented for altitudes from 7.6 kilometers (25,000 feet) to 13.7 kilometers (45,000 feet), Mach numbers from 0.6 to 1.2, and Reynolds numbers from 0.8 x 10 to the 7th power to 2.3 x 10 to the 7th power. Flight results for the airplane with and without area-rule fuselage fairings are compared. The techniques used to determine the lift and drag characteristics of the airplane are discussed. Flight data are compared with wind-tunnel model results, where applicable.

Description: FLEXSTAB, an array of computer programs developed on CDC equipment, has been converted to operate on the IBM 360 computation system. Instructions for installing, validating, and operating FLEXSTAB on the IBM 360 are included. Hardware requirements are itemized and supplemental materials describe JCL sequences, the CDC to IBM conversion, the input output subprograms, and the interprogram data flow.

Description: A magnetic direction-finding network for the detection of lightning cloud-to-ground strikes has been installed along the east coast of the United States. Time, location, flash polarity, stroke count, and peak signal amplitude are recorded in real time. The data were recorded from Maine to North Carolina and as far west as Ohio; analyses were restricted to flashes within 300 km of a direction finder. Measurements of peak signal strength have been obtained from 720,284 first return strokes lowering negative charge. The resulting distribution indicates that few negative strokes have peak currents exceeding 100 kA. Measurements have also been obtained of peak signal strength from 17,694 first return strokes lowering positive charge. These strokes have a median peak current of 45 kA, with some peak currents reaching 300-400 kA. The median peak signal strength and the peak current, double from summer to winter for both negative and positive first return strokes. The polarity of ground flashes is observed to be less than 5 percent positive throughout the summer and early fall, then increases to over 50 percent during the winter, and returns to less than 10 percent in early spring. The percent of positive flashes with one stroke is observed to be approximately 90 percent throughout the year. The percent of negative flashes with one stroke is observed to increase from 40 percent in the summer to approximately 80 percent in January, returning to less than 50 percent in the spring.