The Three Mountain DRAGONS of FIREX-AQ

Satellite remote sensing and global and regional scale modeling of aerosol optical properties have made great strides in temporal and spatial accuracy since the beginning of the EOS era with accuracies that often closely match those of accurate surface and airborne measurements. That being said, remote sensing assessments in mountainous regions are difficult and complicated for all platforms owing to topography imposing spatial, meteorological and landcover gradients that may render retrieval assumptions invalid. This is largely an issue of scale that, as higher resolution systems become available, one would expect improved aerosol retrievals. However data sets to assess and validate retrievals in mountainous regions have not been systematically acquired. The NASA/NOAA FIREX-AQ campaign with objectives to assess the particulate and gas properties of emissions from wild fires in the Northern Rockies in the summer of 2019, provided a unique opportunity to develop a detailed assessment of aerosol optical, microphysical and radiative properties of emissions and transport of aerosols in mountainous topography from ground-based mobile and fixed platforms using sun photometer, micropulse lidars and in situ labs designed to penetrate smoke plumes and regional haze events in 4-D. This paper will describe the AERONET Distributed Regional Aerosol Gridded Network (DRAGON) networks of sun and sky scanning spectral photometers assessments to capture the dynamics of aerosol properties imposed by topographic forcing for a variety of mountainous landcover surfaces. The DRAGONS were spatially designed to capture vertical and locally horizontal gradients with five to eight sites in each network spaced from a few kms to 10s of km horizontally and up to 1000s of meters vertically. Of particular note, a two week period of lunar observations characterized the nighttime dynamics from these networks. Unique to this campaign, two vehicle based mobile lidars and sun photometers paired with two mobile laboratories provided a comprehensive mobile DRAGON of similar scales in regions of wildfire emissions, the DRAGONS breath.