At a glance Full Project Title The EUropean Facility for Airborne Research (EUFAR) Project Objectives • Facilitate and promote transnational access to national research aircraft and instruments. • Reduce redundancy, fill the gaps, and optimise the use and development of airborne facilities to conduct research. • Improve the quality of the service by strengthening expertise through knowledge exchange, development of standards and protocols, constitution of databases, and joint instrumental research activities. • Promote the use of research facilities, especially for young scientists from countries where such facilities are lacking, by providing education and training opportunities on airborne research. • Support both market pull and technology push driven innovation in airborne research, and develop a culture of cooperation between EUFAR experts and SMEs to transfer airborne research instruments, methodologies and software into new products. Project Funding Following three previous contracts under FP5, FP6 and FP7, EUFAR2 will receive €6M over the 4-year span of the project (2014-2018) under EC grant agreement no. 312609. Contact Details Philip R.A. Brown, Cloud Physics Research Manager, EUFAR Scientific and Transnational Access Coordinator Met Office, Fitzroy Road, EXETER EX1 3PB, United Kingdom T: +44 (0)1392 886740 E: phil.brown@metoffice.gov.uk W: www.eufar.net
Phil Brown
Elisabeth Gérard
Philip Brown is the Scientific and Transnational Access Coordinator of EUFAR. He has worked with airborne atmospheric measurements since joining the Met Office in 1979; his main research interests are cloud microphysical and dynamical processes. He has taken part in several UK and international field campaigns with the FAAM aircraft, studying a range of different cloud types. Elisabeth Gérard is the Project Coordinator of EUFAR, a position she has held since 2014 at Météo-France. Previously her main fields of interest were the retrieval of cloud liquid water path and total column water vapour from ground-based, airborne and satellite microwave measurements, and assimilation of satellite radiance data.
Above Left: Car-based DOAS system operated in synergy with the aircraft developed by the Belgian Institute for Space Aeronomy (BIRA), used during the EUFAR-funded AROMAPEX flight campaign, April 2016 (Copyright: Alexis Merlaud, Royal Belgian Institute for Space Aeronomy, Belgium). Above Right: Car-based DOAS system operated in synergy with the aircraft developed by the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry (MPIC), used during the EUFAR-funded AROMAPEX flight campaign, April 2016 (Copyright: Alexis Merlaud, Royal Belgian Institute for Space Aeronomy, Belgium).
Research base A number of students from earlier summer schools have continued their studies in the field, illustrating their long-term importance, now researchers are looking to the future of the programme. EUFAR has gained funding across three different framework programmes, but now Brown and his colleagues plan to explore the possibility of establishing it as an independent legal entity. “The hope is to maintain EUFAR, to promote networking activities amongst aircraft operators and scientific users. We hope to maintain those long-term objectives of sharing expertise on developing best practice across a whole range of activities, including developing the instruments, using them, and calibrating and processing the data,” he outlines. One of the major long-term objectives will be to provide European researchers with access to the aircraft best suited to their scientific needs. “At the moment, scientific communities in each country are geared towards using the facilities that they have access to within their own national funding structures,” says Brown. The UK scientific community for example makes extensive use of the FAAM BAe-146 aircraft. While this aircraft has a fairly comprehensive instrument payload, it does have some limitations in terms of both the altitude it can reach and the overall range that it can achieve; Brown says other aircraft may be better suited to some research projects. “In Germany for example, researchers have had access for the last few years to the G550 HALO
DLR aircraft. While it doesn’t carry quite such a comprehensive instrument payload, it can fly at higher altitudes for much longer durations. It may well be that that would be a better facility for the UK atmospheric science community,” he says. The G550 HALO DLR can be used to gather atmospheric data from the upper troposphere/lower stratosphere, yet it is not currently open to trans-national access. “Almost all the available flight time is taken by the German scientific community that supports it,” explains Brown. A long-term objective is to establish a framework where these kinds of facilities can be shared on a wider basis, beyond that currently offered under EUFAR2. “We’ll need the member organisations to reach an agreement about how they swap flight time amongst the facilities and how they calculate their charges in order to ensure access is being shared fairly and equitably,” outlines Brown. Research in EUFAR could also hold interest outside the environmental science sphere, and Brown says researchers are keen to share findings. “We are trying to reach out across as wide a cross-section of the EUFAR community as possible to identify where groups are developing particular innovative measurement techniques, and to look for examples where those techniques or capabilities can be applied beyond the environmental science research sphere,” he continues. “There could hopefully be opportunities for small businesses across Europe to build on EUFAR research and develop marketable products.”
The FUB Cessna aircraft (D-EAFU) used during the EUFAR-funded AROMAPEX flight campaign, April 2016 (Copyright: Alexis Merlaud, Royal Belgian Institute for Space Aeronomy, Belgium).
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