CVAO#
The Cape Verde Atmospheric Observatory (CVAO) is located on São Vicente, one of the Cape Verde Islands, about 800 km west of the African continent. It was founded in 2007 on the basis of several joint third-party funded projects such as TENATSO (EU infrastructure project) and SOPRAN (BMBF research project) in international cooperation with UK SOLAS (University York), the Max Planck Institute for Biogeochemistry (MPI-BGC) Jena and the Instituto Nacional de Meteorologia e Geofisica (INMG) of the Republic of Cabo Verde. Since then, in-situ air samples have been taken continuously on a 30m tower for chemical and physical characterisation of the background aerosol in the subtropical Atlantic.
The aim of all investigations is the long-term recording of the near-surface particle composition and its seasonal and interannual variability in the tropical northeastern Atlantic. The observatory monitors both the continental transport of Saharan dust from northern Africa as well as marine aerosol. For both phenomena, developments over longer periods of time are important in order to be able to reliably characterise developments in the context of global climate change.
Instruments#
So far, the station comprises a complete aerosol and cloud remote sensing set up:
A 15-channel multiwavelength Raman polarization lidar of type PollyXT (TROPOS development) for measuring aerosol, cloud and water vapour profiles. polly.tropos.de
An AERONET sun-sky-lunar photometer (CIMEL).
A RPG HATRPO G5 microwave radiometer
A cloud profiling radar
A HALO photonics streamline XR scanning Doppler lidar _ And a BSRN-like radiation station