Our understanding of the atmospheric composition of the most remote regions of the world has been limited by a lack of observations - until now. Current Project: NASA ATom Project

Atmospheric Tomography
is a NASA-funded multi-year program (2015-2020) to measure the chemical composition of the atmosphere of the most remote regions of the world. The ATom flights include sampling from the surface to the tropopause, from the (almost) north pole to the (almost) south pole through the Pacific and Atlantic across four seasons. Róisín was part of the Harvard QCLS team that measured carbon dioxide, methane, carbon monoxide and nitrous oxide and work is ongoing to work up that data.
Recent Publications
Our paper on nitrous oxide observations during ATom is out in ACP! Yenny Gonzalez Ramos lead the paper with contributions from Luke Schiferl and Róisín Commane as corresponding author. Yenny is now a researcher at the Izana Atmospheric Research Observatory in Tenerife and she wrote a great summary of the paper in English and Spanish!
Gonzalez, Y., Commane, R., Manninen, E., Daube, B. C., Schiferl, L. D., McManus, J. B., McKain, K., Hintsa, E. J., Elkins, J. W., Montzka, S. A., Sweeney, C., Moore, F., Jimenez, J. L., Campuzano Jost, P., Ryerson, T. B., Bourgeois, I., Peischl, J., Thompson, C. R., Ray, E., Wennberg, P. O., Crounse, J., Kim, M., Allen, H. M., Newman, P. A., Stephens, B. B., Apel, E. C., Hornbrook, R. S., Nault, B. A., Morgan, E., and Wofsy, S. C.: Impact of stratospheric air and surface emissions on tropospheric nitrous oxide during ATom, Atmos. Chem. Phys., 21, 11113–11132, https://doi.org/10.5194/acp-21-11113-2021, 2021. link
Matt's paper was published in Science in December 2021! It uses ATom observations coupled with other aircraft observations to examine the air-sea flux of carbon dioxide over the southern ocean
Long, M. C., Stephens, B. B., McKain, K., Sweeney, C., Keeling, R. F., Kort, E. A., Morgan, E. J., Bent, J. D., Chandra, N., Chevallier, F., Commane, R., Daube, B. C., Krummel, P. B., Loh, Z., Luijkx, I. T., Munro, D., Patra, P., Peters, W., Ramonet, M., Rödenbeck, C., Stavert, A., Tans, P., and Wofsy, S. C.: Strong Southern Ocean carbon uptake evident in airborne observations, Science, 374, 1275–1280, https://doi.org/10.1126/science.abi4355, 2021. link
ATom Publications using QCLS data
- Hegarty et al., 2022
- Long et al., 2021
- Bourgeois et al., 2021
- Gonzalez Ramos et al., 2021
- Brock et al., 2021
- Hintsa et al., 2021
- Guo et al., 2021
- Chen et al., 2021
- Bates et al., 2021
- Liu et al., 2021
- Bourgeois et al., 2020
- Martinez-Alonso et al., 2020
- Wang et al., 2020
- Travis et al., 2020
- Thames et al., 2020
- Brewer et al., 2020
- Brune et al., 2020
- Wang et al., 2019
- Strode et al., 2018
Recent Presentations
Nitrous Oxide observations: Commane et al., AMS 2021 Invited Presentation
Carbon Monoxide observations: Commane et al., AMS 2020
Assessing the Impact of African Emissions on Tropical Atmospheric Composition
Published Data from ATom
- Wofsy et al., 2021 ATom: Merged Atmospheric Chemistry, Trace Gases, and Aerosols, Version 2. ORNL DAAC, Oak Ridge, Tennessee, USA. https://doi.org/10.3334/ORNLDAAC/1925
- Commane, R., J.W. Budney, Y. Gonzalez Ramos, M. Sargent, S.C. Wofsy, and B.C. Daube. 2020. ATom: Measurements from the Quantum Cascade Laser System (QCLS). ORNL DAAC, Oak Ridge, Tennessee, USA. https://doi.org/10.3334/ORNLDAAC/1747
- Commane, R., J.W. Budney, Y. Gonzalez Ramos, M. Sargent, S.C. Wofsy, and B.C. Daube. 2021. ATom: Measurements from the Quantum Cascade Laser System (QCLS), Version 2. ORNL DAAC, Oak Ridge, Tennessee, USA. https://doi.org/10.3334/ORNLDAAC/1932

Flight Overview
We follow similar flight tracks each time (unless re-routing for weather or runway issues). We travel anti-clockwise in order to make use of the tailwinds on the long flight from New Zealand to Chile.
- ATom1 - August 2016,
- ATom2 - Febrary 2017
- ATom3 - October 2017
- ATom4 - May 2018
MEDIA COVERAGE of ATom
02/2017: NPR Radio (Morning Edition)
02/2017: WCAI (NPR Radio on Cape Cod and Islands)
02/2017: NASA produced video updates for ATom-2
08/2016: NASA Earth Blog Posts
08/2016: NASA produced video updates for ATom-1 on NASA Goddard YouTube Channel. Complete list of videos listed here
ATom1 Blog Posts:
08/02/2016: Departing for Cooler Climates
08/19/2016: Going back in Time
08/26/2016: Is there any such thing as remote clean air?
08/29/2016: Challenging Back Half
08/30/2016: Lessons learne