Convective entrainment deduced from biomass burning plume ingestion at altitude during the 2012 DC3 airborne field project

We present airborne measurements of atmospheric chemical species in the vicinity of an evolving isolated supercell thunderstorm, taken aboard the NASA DC-8 instrumented research aircraft on June 22, 2012, during the Deep Convective Clouds and Chemistry (DC3) project. The aircraft study over the course of 2 hours sampled boundary layer and free tropospheric inflow regions as well as outflow in the cirrus anvil and downwind. Chemical measurements at outflow altitudes of 10 km prior to and following entrainment of a biomass burning plume, primarily ingested at 8 km, are used to calculate the fraction of air lofted directly from the convective surface layer and that entrained from the middle free troposphere.