Using an unmanned aircraft to observe black carbon aerosols during a prescribed fire at the RxCADRE campaign

Black carbon (BC) aerosols impact the earth´s climate by absorbing solar radiation in the atmosphere and depositing on ice surfaces and lowering the albedo of those surfaces. Black carbon aerosols have been widely studied; however, using small unmanned aircraft systems (UAS) for the airborne study of the vertical and horizontal concentrations of BC is new territory. Using UAS to study BC poses some challenges due to size and weight restrictions of the aircraft, as well as issues that arise when adapting ground based instrumentation for use on different aircraft. University of Alaska Fairbanks researchers successfully integrated and flew a microAeth AE-51 on a Boeing ScanEagle to measure the concentration of BC and other absorbing and scattering particles during a prescribed fire experiment, RxCADRE, conducted at Eglin AFB, FL, during October and November 2012. The microAeth successfully collected black carbon aerosols in the smoke plume when the Boeing ScanEagle UAS encountered the plume.