The Coastal Air Pollution field campaigns in 2009 and 2010 (CAP-2009 and CAP-2010 respectively) sought to investigate the impact of local meteorology on coastal air quality and the structure and evolution of the coastal boundary layer.

The field campaigns were led by Dr. Claire Reeves (University of East Anglia) consisting of 20 hours of flight time from the Facility for Airborne Atmospheric Measurements (FAAM) BAE-146 aircraft coinciding with pollution measurements from the Weybourne Atmospheric Observatory (WAO) and the Facility for Ground based Atmospheric Measurement's (FGAM) 1290 Mhz mobile wind profiler, deployed at WAO. The 20 flight hours were over 5 flights: flight B480 21/09/09; flight B485 06/11/09; flight B492 01/12/09; flight B493 04/12/09; and, flight B514 04/03/10. The FAAM flights were made available as part of the 2009 Direct Access call for available remaining flight hours on the aircraft.

The objectives were to:
a) characterise the chemical composition of the air above and around WAO (Weybourne Atmospheric Observatory) in various meteorological conditions to determine how representative the observations at WAO are of the coastal region and of the air-mass origin (especially in the case of maritime/Arctic air);
b) determine the local flow patterns that can be established around WAO that may influence the redistribution of pollutants and to aid future identification of such patterns with the more limited vertical data that is routinely collected at WAO;
c) identify patterns that decouple polluted layers from the surface;
d) characterise the off-shore pollution sources (ship emissions, emissions from off-shore gas platforms) that impact measurements at WAO under maritime conditions; and,
e) provide test cases for the one-dimensional MISTRA model of vertical profiles of trace components in the boundary layer and lower free troposphere, especially providing information about vertical exchange.