Bill Dubé and Craig Simons, increased science payload on NOAA P-3 aircraft

Bill Dubé and Craig Simons have done the seemingly impossible: Through their careful and collaborative engineering efforts over the last year, they have substantially increased the science payload on the NOAA P-3 research aircraft. This additional capacity would not have been realized without Bill and Craig’s innovative contributions, impressive engineering talent, and sustained hard work, and will permit new climate-relevant measurements of aerosol optical properties to be added to an already completely full aircraft without compromising the existing P-3 aircraft instrumentation suite. Bill and Craig suggested the existing electronics racks be replaced with a new light-weight design that would free sufficient payload weight to easily accommodate the new aerosol instruments. CIRES researchers will now be able to address new and pressing issues related to aerosol chemical processing, radiative forcing, and cloud-aerosol interactions.