TRO-pico : overview

TRO-Pico is a 5 year project funded by the French National Agency (ANR). It aims at studying deep convection in the tropics and more precisely, the impact of overshooting convection in the lower stratosphere on the stratospheric water budget, from the local to the continental scale.
The project is to make use of a combination of balloon (zero pressure 500 m3 or 1500 m3, or 1.2 kg rubber balloon), ground-based and satellite observations and model simulations at various scales. Field measurements consist in a small balloon campaign in one of the most convectively active part of South America, the state of Sao Paulo in Brazil in the summer season, extending on two time periods:
- the first, called SMOP for « Six Month Observing Period » from November 2012 to March 2013, of regular water vapour soundings three times per month using the Pico-SDLA diode laser hygrometer for studying the change of water vapour during the full convective season, and,
- a shorter period called IOP for « Intense Observing Period » during the most intense convective period that took place both in March 2012 and in January-February 2013, dedicated to the study of troposphere-to-stratosphere transport and stratospheric moistening and their impact at the regional scale by a number of soundings of water vapour, methane, NOx, ozone, CO2, aerosols or ice particles using adequate light-weight instruments.

Further information on GSMA website