Airborne Compact Atmospheric Mapper (ACAM) Overview and Performance During the Discover-AQ 2011 Maryland Deployment

The Airborne Compact Atmospheric Mapper (ACAM) was designed and built at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center as part of an effort to provide high spatial resolution (1km) remote sensing observations of tropospheric and boundary layer pollutants from an aircraft platform. ACAM was deployed in July of 2011 as part of the Discover-AQ (Air Quality) Mission onboard a NASA Langley King Air aircraft. The instrument consists of a commercial miniature UV/VIS spectrograph coupled via fiber optic to a cross-track scanner in order to provide spatial mapping capabilities. This poster provides an overview of the instrument and it's performance during the deployment, including slant column retrievals of nitrogen dioxide (NO₂), ozone (O₃), and formaldehyde (CH₂O). Results of slant to vertical column conversions will also be presented, along with comparisons to coincident ground-based and satellite measurements. ACAM measurements of slant column NO₂ on July 22nd over the Washington DC/Baltimore region.