An Overview of the PICO-NARE Station, and
an Introduction to Trajectory Cluster Analysis
Chris Owen, Michigan Tech
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The PICO-NARE station began making measurement of CO, O3, black carbon (BC) and
met data in the summer of 2001. Measurement of NOx and NOy began the following
summer. The station is located atop Pico Mountain in the Azores Islands
in the central Atlantic Ocean, making it a unique location for ground-based
measurements in the lower free troposphere. In order to aid the analysis
of these measurements, a transport climatology to the station was developed
with a 40-year set of back trajectories using cluster analysis. Many methods
are available to conduct a cluster analysis. However, the dependence of
the resulting clusters upon the specific clustering method chosen has not
been fully characterised. Specifically, the use of hierarchical versus non-hierarchical
clustering algorithms has received little focus. This presentation will
highlight the available methods for performing a cluster analysis and will
demonstrate the sensitivity of the results to the methods as well as give
an overview of the station, its measurement and the motivation for these
measurements.
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