Work

The MAESTRO turbulence dataset derived from the SAFIRE ATR42 aircraft

Year: 2026

Type: article

Abstract: The MAESTRO airborne field campaign took place between 10 August and 10 September 2024 over the North Atlantic tropical ocean near the Cabo Verde Islands. Its goal was to investigate the processes that control the mesoscale organization of clouds with a payload of probes and sensors, as well as vertically and horizontally-pointing radars and lidars. A particular attention was given to the role of coherent structures in the boundary layer. This focus motivated the acquisition of high-resolution measurements of temperature and water vapor to capture turbulence dynamics in the subcloud layer. To achieve this, six hygrometers and four temperature sensors were deployed, including a new fast-rate hygrometer called FAST-WAVE. This article describes the turbulence dataset, prepared on the basis of these measurements. It consists of 25 Hz segmented time series of calibrated water vapor mixing ratio, temperature, and three-dimensional wind taken with an air speed of approximately 100 m s −1 , relative to the aircraft, their corresponding fluctuations, as well as statistical moments, covariance, and integral length scales. In total, 40 h of stabilized legs data were gathered in a wide range of mesoscale contexts and local cloud conditions, with nearly 13 h consisting of high-quality boundary-layer samples. This paper describes the methodological choices required to obtain the dataset, including calibrations, and corrections applied to the original measurements. The collection of NetCDF files composing this dataset is publicly available on the AERIS website (https://doi.org/10.25326/812#v7.0, Jaffeux and Lothon, 2025; see also https://maestro.aeris-data.fr/overview/, last access: 9 June 2026).

Source: Earth system science data

DOI: 10.5194/essd-18-8229-2026