AGAP: an atmospheric gondola for aerosol profiling

A novel airborne gondola was developed to profile the Arctic boundary layer exploiting a tethered balloon system. A number of aerosol instrumentations were customized and deployed in the gondola for two test campaigns conducted in Ny-lesund in September 2014 and April-May 2015. The performances of the instrumental setup have been characterized and will be described in the present paper. An illustration of the main results and a discussion of the main phenomenology will be also presented. Briefly, the tethered balloon systems demonstrates the capability of successfully lifting up to 15 kg of scientific payload, featuring a power autonomy of about 3 h of continuous measurements with one battery. We demonstrate for the first time on a tethered balloon the capability of measuring at the same time aerosol light scattering, absorption coefficients and size distribution, which is very promising for deducing the aerosol optical properties as a function of height along the probed atmospheric column.