The FAAM Airborne Laboratory is an atmospheric science research facility. It is based on the

Cranfield University Cranfield University is a postgraduate-only public research university in the United Kingdom that specialises in science, engineering, design, technology and management. Cranfield was founded as the College of Aeronautics (CoA) in 1946. Throug ...

campus alongside

Cranfield Airport Cranfield Airport is an airfield just outside the village of Cranfield, in Bedfordshire, England. It is south-west of Bedford and east of Milton Keynes. It was originally a Second World War aerodrome, RAF Cranfield. It is now used for busin ...

Bedfordshire Bedfordshire (; abbreviated ''Beds'') is a Ceremonial County, ceremonial county in the East of England. It is bordered by Northamptonshire to the north, Cambridgeshire to the north-east, Hertfordshire to the south and the south-east, and Buckin ...

, England. It was formed by a collaboration between the

Met Office The Met Office, until November 2000 officially the Meteorological Office, is the United Kingdom's national weather and climate service. It is an executive agency and trading fund of the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology and ...

and the

Natural Environment Research Council The Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) is a British Research Councils UK, research council that supports research, training and knowledge transfer activities in the environmental sciences. History NERC began in 1965 when several envir ...

(NERC) in 2001.

The facility

FAAM was established jointly by the Natural Environmental Research Council and the Met Office. Initial funding was provided to prepare an aircraft for instrumentation. The main aircraft used is a modified BAe 146-301 aircraft, registration G-LUXE, owned by NERC and operated by Airtask. FAAM B658 1

Work carried out by FAAM includes *

Radiative transfer Radiative transfer (also called radiation transport) is the physical phenomenon of energy transfer in the form of electromagnetic radiation. The propagation of radiation through a medium is affected by absorption, emission, and scattering process ...

studies in clear and cloudy air; *

Tropospheric The troposphere is the lowest layer of the atmosphere of Earth. It contains 80% of the total mass of the planetary atmosphere and 99% of the total mass of water vapor and aerosols, and is where most weather phenomena occur. From the planetary s ...

chemistry measurements; *

Cloud physics Cloud physics is the study of the physical processes that lead to the formation, growth and precipitation of atmospheric clouds. These aerosols are found in the troposphere, stratosphere, and mesosphere, which collectively make up the greatest p ...

and dynamic studies; * Dynamics of mesoscale weather systems; *

Boundary layer In physics and fluid mechanics, a boundary layer is the thin layer of fluid in the immediate vicinity of a Boundary (thermodynamic), bounding surface formed by the fluid flowing along the surface. The fluid's interaction with the wall induces ...

and turbulence studies; *

Remote sensing Remote sensing is the acquisition of information about an physical object, object or phenomenon without making physical contact with the object, in contrast to in situ or on-site observation. The term is applied especially to acquiring inform ...

: verification of ground-based instruments; * Satellite ground truth:

radiometric Radiometry is a set of techniques for measuring electromagnetic radiation, including visible light. Radiometric techniques in optics characterize the distribution of the radiation's power in space, as opposed to photometric techniques, which ch ...

measurements and winds; * Satellite instrument test-bed; FAAM is staffed by a mixture of NERC,

University of Leeds The University of Leeds is a public research university in Leeds, West Yorkshire, England. It was established in 1874 as the Yorkshire College of Science. In 1884, it merged with the Leeds School of Medicine (established 1831) and was renamed Y ...

and Met Office personnel, and acts as a servant to numerous UK and occasionally overseas science organisations; primarily the Met Office itself, or UK universities funded by NERC. It flies around 400 hours annually, most commonly on large campaigns where a team of typically 30 will spend around a month at a base location, potentially anywhere in the world, delivering a specific science campaign, although some flying from Cranfield also takes place. An emergency response role exists, which has been used three times - at the 2005

Buncefield fire The Buncefield fire was a major fire at an oil storage facility that started at 06:01 UTC on Sunday 11 December 2005 at the Hertfordshire Oil Storage Terminal, located near the M1 motorway, Hemel Hempstead, in Hertfordshire, England. The ter ...

, the 2010

Eyjafjallajökull Eyjafjallajökull (; "glacier of (the mountain) Eyjafjöll"), sometimes referred to by the numeronym E15, is one of the smaller ice caps of Iceland, north of Skógar and west of Mýrdalsjökull. The ice cap covers the caldera of a volcano wi ...

volcanic eruption and 2012 Total Elgin gas platform leak: after Eyjafjallajökull a new aircraft, MOCCA - the Met Office Civil Contingency Aircraft, has been commissioned as the "first responder" to British volcanic ash emergencies.

History

The facility was originally established in 2001, with an intended operating base of the

BAe BAE Systems plc is a British multinational aerospace, military and information security company, based in London. It is the largest manufacturer in Britain as of 2017. It is the largest defence contractor in Europe and the seventh largest i ...

site at Woodford, in Cheshire. However, by 2004 when the aircraft was delivered, BAe had decided to close Woodford, so eventually the facility was re-sited at Cranfield, although it initially had limited involvement with that university, the largest university customers being Manchester, Cambridge, Leeds and York. Since 2016 FAAM has been co-located in a new dedicated building with a new department of Atmospheric Informatics of Cranfield University, and its involvement with Cranfield is becoming closer. From 2008 - 2014 FAAM was headed by Dr. Guy Gratton, an aeronautical engineer; it is now headed by Mr Alan Woolley, an instrumentation scientist.

References

{{authority control Atmospheric sounding Climate of England Cranfield University Governmental meteorological agencies in Europe Met Office Meteorological data and networks Meteorological organisations based in the United Kingdom Natural Environment Research Council Science and technology in Bedfordshire University of Leeds Air pollution in the United Kingdom 2001 establishments in England