Toward optimizing ground-based thermodynamic retrievals with WxUAS

As increased attention is being given to the atmospheric boundary layer (ABL), more instruments and techniques are becoming available to advance understanding of the processes that occur in this region of the atmosphere. Ground-based remote sensors and weather sensing, uncrewed aerial vehicles (WxUAS) have continued to advance to the point where they are routinely used as observational tools for ABL studies. However, questions still remain as to what combination of instruments is most appropriate for operational and research-grade observation networks. This talk will detail some experiments combining observations from multiple thermodynamic profiling platforms into a single data product. The framework used is the newly ported Tropospheric Remotely Observed Profiling via optimal estimation (TROPoe) algorithm. This is a Python port of the AERIoe retrieval (Turner and Lohnert 2014; Turner and Blumberg 2019). This physics-based framework allows many different types of measurements to be included in the observation vector. The first part of the talk will focus on tests performed using data collected from the Collaborative Lower Atmospheric Mobile Profiling System (CLAMPS) during multiple years of VORTEX-SE. Tests were performed to determine the sensitivity of TROPoe to the prior constraint used for the retrievals. The next part will build upon previous work using data from the Lower Atmospheric Profiling Studies at Elevation - a Remotely-piloted Aircraft Team Experiment (LAPSE-RATE). Initial results from combining CLAMPS data and WxUAS in a joint TROPoe retrieval will be shown.