Testing the altitude attribution and vertical resolution of AirCore measurements with a new spiking method

Abstract. AirCores have been increasingly used to capture vertical profiles of trace gases reaching from the ground up to about 30 km, in order to validate remote sensing instruments and to investigate transport processes in the stratosphere. When deployed to a weather balloon, accurately attributing the trace gas measurements to the sampling altitudes is non-trivial especially in the stratosphere. In this paper we present the CO-spiking experiment, which can be deployed to any AirCore on any platform in order to evaluate different computational altitude attribution processes and to experimentally derive the vertical resolution of the profile by injecting small volumes of signal gas at predefined GPS-altitudes during sampling. We performed two CO-spiking flights with an AirCore from the Goethe-University of Frankfurt (GUF) deployed to a weather balloon in Traînou, France in June 2019. The altitude retrieval based on an instantaneous pressure equilibrium assumption slightly overestimates the sampling altitudes, especially at the top of the profiles. For these two flights our altitude attribution is accurate within 250 m below 20 km. Above 20 km the bias becomes larger and reaches up to 1.2 km at 27 km altitude. Differences in descent velocities are uncovered to have a major impact on the altitude attribution bias. We identified the time lag between the theoretically attributed altitude and the actual CO-spike release altitude to be a possible empirical correction parameter for our AirCore altitude retrieval across different flights. Regarding the corrected profiles, the altitude attribution is accurate within 120 m throughout the profile. Further investigations are needed in order to test for the scope of validity of this correction parameter regarding different ambient conditions and maximum flight altitudes. We derive the vertical resolution from the CO-spikes of both flights and compare it to the modelled vertical resolution. The modelled vertical resolution is better than the experimentally derived resolution throughout the profile, albeit agrees within 220 m. All our findings derived from the two CO-spiking flights are strictly bound to the GUF AirCore dimensions. The newly introduced CO-spiking experiment can be used to test different combinations of AirCore configurations and platforms in future studies.