Succesful start up of a new aerosol station!

Observations of the free troposphere are needed to understand long-range transport, climate change and trends in the oxidizing capacity of the atmosphere, as well as to provide a baseline for the characterization of atmospheric chemistry and physics. A review of global networks  shows that the Southern Hemisphere is clearly under-sampled in comparison to the Northern Hemisphere and, although this is partly due to the predominance of oceanic surfaces, it is also due to both the lack of monitoring stations on land and the restricted number of dedicated field campaigns in vast areas of the Southern Hemisphere.A consortium of scientific institutions(1) has proposed and carried out the implementation of a long-term station at Mount Chacaltaya (16º21'S, 68º08'W, 5300 masl) operated by the Laboratory for Atmospheric Physics (Laboratorio de Física de la Atmósfera, LFA-UMSA) with the potential to become the 3rd.
GAW global station in South America and a unique high-altitude station over the continent.The new station has begun operations on December 2011. After some infrastructure refurbishing at the station and the installation of a brand new weather station at the summit (part of the SENAMHI network)  all instruments were installed and are currently working  (see photographs). In addition, a LIDAR system has been used on a regular basis since 2011 at the LFA to characterize the boundary layer  and it will be used in the future to study the BL evolution in the vicinity of the new CHC-GAW station.