Overview of the KMA/NIMS Atmospheric Research Aircraft (NARA) and its data archive: Annual airborne observations over the Korean peninsula

Abstract

This study describes the Korea Meteorological Administration/National Institute of Meteorological Sciences (KMA/NIMS) Atmospheric Research Aircraft (NARA) and its observational data archive. NARA has been performing annual observation flights, which are aimed at reducing the uncertainty of atmospheric observations in the observation data gap area around the Korean peninsula, since January 2018. An online system has also been constructed to provide data management, transmission, quality control and simple visualization. The mission strategy of NARA is subdivided into four individual units, namely observations of severe weather (SW), climate monitoring (CM), environmental monitoring (EM) and cloud physics and weather modification experiments (CP). As of December 2020, NARA has been launched operationally for 325 flights (corresponding to 9.02 flights per month), typically over the West Sea, mid-inland areas (34.4% and 25.4%, respectively), and below an altitude of 3 km (51.9%). Results of intercomparison tests confirmed that NARA measurements have reasonable offsets (<0.9%) to each other in terms of pressure and temperature. Moreover, the monthly average temperature profile in the East Sea area showed a seasonal variation was detected in monthly variation. From these results, it is evident that NARA data will contribute significantly to enhancing the level of scientific understanding of atmospheric observations and the applications (i.e. long-term study) thereof as the amount of data accumulated increases.