ATom: Aircraft Flight Track and Navigational Data

This dataset provides flight track and aircraft navigation data from the NASA Atmospheric Tomography Mission (ATom). Flight track information is available for the four ATom campaigns: ATom-1, ATom-2, ATom-3, and ATom-4. Each ATom campaign consists of multiple individual flights and flight navigational information is recorded in 10-second intervals. Data available for each flight includes research flight number, date, and start and stop time of each 10-second interval. In addition, latitude, longitude, altitude, pressure and temperature is included at each 10-second interval. NASA's ATom campaign deploys an extensive gas and aerosol payload on the NASA DC-8 aircraft for systematic, global-scale sampling of the atmosphere, profiling continuously from 0.2 to 12 km altitude. Flights occurred in each of 4 seasons from 2016 to 2018. During each campaign, flights originate from the Armstrong Flight Research Center in Palmdale, California, fly north to the western Arctic, south to the South Pacific, east to the Atlantic, north to Greenland, and return to California across central North America. ATom establishes a single, contiguous, global-scale dataset. One intended use of this flight track data is to facilitate to mapping model results from global models onto the precise ATom flight tracks for comparison.

Data and Resources

Additional Info

Field Value
Maintainer Earthdata Forum
Last Updated June 22, 2026, 19:11 (UTC)
Created April 1, 2025, 14:37 (UTC)
accessLevel public
bureauCode {026:00}
catalog_conformsTo https://project-open-data.cio.gov/v1.1/schema
harvest_object_id 6a41cff4-1aa5-4408-9099-ba9bdf9b855b
harvest_source_id b99e41c6-fe79-4c19-bbc3-9b6c8111bfac
harvest_source_title Science Discovery Engine
identifier 10.3334/ORNLDAAC/1613
license https://www.usa.gov/government-works
modified 2026-06-15T22:15:59Z
programCode {026:000}
publisher ORNL_DAAC
resource-type Dataset
source_datajson_identifier true
source_hash 64fa62c74509615efe9ce608c17e0186601f0d2ef436cb8dd9a026d326f8f237
source_schema_version 1.1
spatial ["CARTESIAN", [{"WestBoundingCoordinate": -180.0, "NorthBoundingCoordinate": 82.9404, "EastBoundingCoordinate": 180.0, "SouthBoundingCoordinate": -86.1768}]]
temporal 2016-07-29/2018-05-21
theme {"Earth Science"}