Supporting documentation for the progress reports (charts, data, etc) for the NSF project Quasi-Lagrangian measurements of polar stratospheric cloud particle development from long-duration balloon platforms.

For this project 6 instruments have been purchased from Particle Measurements Inc. (now TSI inc.) in Boulder, Colorado. The gain stages of these instruments were specifically modified for us to perform stratospheric aerosol measurements. The University of Wyoming was responsible for calibration and laboratory and cold testing of these instruments planned for field work in August, September 2010.

To interface the instrument to the controlling French gondola controller required the development of a data system and interface between the instrument and the gondola controller. The following information can be found at the anonymous ftp site.

ftp://cat.uwyo.edu/pub/permanent/balloon/Reports/Concordiasi/

In that overall directory there are sub directories for each instrument (J4p – J9p), for pump tests, and for pictures and drawings. There is one subdirectory for each instrument as they are in varying stages of development. Under each instrument there are additional subdirectories for Calibration and the type of test completed:

/Laramie_EnvChamber - preliminary cold temperature testing

/PSB_Simulator - tests using the data system which simulates the French gondola controller (the PSB

/Toulouse - tests completed in the environmental chamber in Toulouse France.

/UW_das – tests completed with a University of Wyoming data system.

If more than one tests was completed for a particular data system then there are further subdirectories specified by the date of the test in the format yymmdd. The temperatures listed in the file names and on the figures uses the Kelvin scale (K) where 273 K = 0ºC.

The information for any test is in the form of binary data (*.bin), descriptor files (*.des) to analyze the binary data, figures (*.ps), and lists (*.dat) of the analyzed data. The figures can be most easily read with Ghostscript which can be obtained for free for non commercial use, http://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~ghost/, but any other postscript reader will work as well.