OPC#

In-situ measurements of the particle number concentration and size distribution of ambient aerosol particles and cloud residual particles using an optical particle counter (OPC).

Each textfile contains the data obtained during a single flight. The file contains the time, location and size distribution between 0.25 µm and 40 µm, two flags indicating the used inlet system and a flag for cloud residual sampling.

The following example demonstrates the use of the OPC data collected during the ACLOUD campaign.

If you have questions or if you would like to use the data for a publication, please don’t hesitate to get in contact with the dataset authors as stated in the dataset attributes contact or author.

Data access#

  • To analyse the data they first have to be loaded by importing the (AC)³airborne meta data catalogue. To do so the ac3airborne package has to be installed. More information on how to do that and about the catalog can be found here.

Get data#

import ac3airborne

List of flights, where OPC data is available:

cat = ac3airborne.get_intake_catalog()

datasets = []
for campaign in ['ACLOUD']:
    datasets.extend(list(cat[campaign]['P6']['OPC']))
datasets

['ACLOUD_P6_RF07',
 'ACLOUD_P6_RF08',
 'ACLOUD_P6_RF09',
 'ACLOUD_P6_RF10',
 'ACLOUD_P6_RF11',
 'ACLOUD_P6_RF12',
 'ACLOUD_P6_RF13',
 'ACLOUD_P6_RF14',
 'ACLOUD_P6_RF15',
 'ACLOUD_P6_RF16',
 'ACLOUD_P6_RF17',
 'ACLOUD_P6_RF18',
 'ACLOUD_P6_RF19',
 'ACLOUD_P6_RF20',
 'ACLOUD_P6_RF21',
 'ACLOUD_P6_RF22',
 'ACLOUD_P6_RF23',
 'ACLOUD_P6_RF24',
 'ACLOUD_P6_RF25']

Dataset#

To get an overview of the variables recorded by OPC, we load the dataset of the first ACLOUD flight ACLOUD_P6_RF07.

ds_opc = cat['ACLOUD']['P6']['OPC']['ACLOUD_P6_RF07'].read()
ds_opc
ID (aircraft, flight number) Date/Time Altitude [m] Latitude Longitude dN/dlogDp [#/cm**3] (Diameter boundary 250-280nm) dN/dlogDp [#/cm**3] (Diameter boundary 280-300nm) dN/dlogDp [#/cm**3] (Diameter boundary 300-350nm) dN/dlogDp [#/cm**3] (Diameter boundary 350-400nm) dN/dlogDp [#/cm**3] (Diameter boundary 400-450nm) ... dN/dlogDp [#/cm**3] (Diameter boundary 15000-17500nm) dN/dlogDp [#/cm**3] (Diameter boundary 17500-20000nm) dN/dlogDp [#/cm**3] (Diameter boundary 20000-25000nm) dN/dlogDp [#/cm**3] (Diameter boundary 25000-30000nm) dN/dlogDp [#/cm**3] (Diameter boundary 30000-32000nm) dN/dlogDp [#/cm**3] (Diameter boundary 32000-40000nm) P tech [hPa] (OPC pressure) Method comm (Aerosol inlet value, 1 = conn...) Method comm (CVI inlet value,1 = connected...) Method comm (Cloud value, 1 = measurement ...)
0 P6_07 2017-05-27T13:01:55 31.0 78.2458 15.4716 NaN NaN NaN NaN NaN ... NaN NaN NaN NaN NaN NaN 1029.1 0.0 0.0 0.0
1 P6_07 2017-05-27T13:02:01 34.0 78.2460 15.4676 58.9215 33.3742 11.9498 7.7597 0.0000 ... 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 1033.2 1.0 0.0 0.0
2 P6_07 2017-05-27T13:02:07 55.0 78.2467 15.4554 32.5084 48.3926 11.2029 6.0353 1.9549 ... 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 1041.4 1.0 0.0 0.0
3 P6_07 2017-05-27T13:02:13 81.0 78.2473 15.4432 40.6355 25.0307 9.7092 4.3109 1.9549 ... 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 1025.0 1.0 0.0 0.0
4 P6_07 2017-05-27T13:02:19 105.0 78.2480 15.4310 47.7467 36.7117 11.9498 9.4841 2.9324 ... 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 1029.1 1.0 0.0 0.0
... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ...
2046 P6_07 2017-05-27T16:26:30 75.0 78.2505 15.3896 33.5243 28.3681 7.4686 2.5866 0.9775 ... 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 1020.9 0.0 1.0 0.0
2047 P6_07 2017-05-27T16:26:37 56.0 78.2496 15.4043 22.3495 21.6932 11.2029 5.1731 1.9549 ... 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 1020.9 0.0 1.0 0.0
2048 P6_07 2017-05-27T16:26:43 43.0 78.2489 15.4168 23.3654 20.0245 5.2280 4.3109 0.9775 ... 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 1020.9 0.0 1.0 0.0
2049 P6_07 2017-05-27T16:26:49 31.0 78.2482 15.4292 19.3019 16.6871 2.9874 0.8622 0.9775 ... 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 1033.2 0.0 1.0 0.0
2050 P6_07 2017-05-27T16:26:54 29.0 78.2476 15.4392 19.3019 31.7055 2.2406 2.5866 1.9549 ... 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 1037.3 0.0 1.0 0.0

2051 rows × 40 columns

View variables#