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We describe a new version of the Chicago Water Isotope Spectrometer (ChiWIS), designed for airborne measurements of vapor-phase water isotopologues in the dry upper troposphere and lower stratosphere (UTLS) aboard research aircraft. This version of the instrument is a tunable diode laser (TDL), off-axis integrated cavity output spectrometer (OA-ICOS). The instrument was designed to measure the HDO/H2O ratio in the 2017 Asian Summer Monsoon flight aboard the M-55 Geophysica during the StratoClim campaign, and so far has also flown aboard the WB-57F in the 2021 and 2022 ACCLIP campaigns. The spectrometer scans absorption lines of both H2O and HDO near 2.647 μm wavelength in a single current sweep, and has an effective path length of 7.5 km under optimal conditions. The instrument utilizes a novel non-axially-symmetric optical component which increases the signal-to-noise ratio by a factor of 3. Ultra-polished, 4-inch diameter cavity mirrors suppress scattering losses, maximize mirror reflectivity, and yield optical fringing significantly below typical electrical noise levels. In laboratory conditions, the instrument has demonstrated a 5-second measurement precision of 3.6 ppbv and 82 pptv in H2O and HDO, respectively. 

Abstract. High-altitude cirrus clouds are climatically important: their formationfreeze-dries air ascending to the stratosphere to its final value, and theirradiative impact is disproportionately large. However, their formation andgrowth are not fully understood, and multiple in situ aircraft campaigns haveobserved frequent and persistent apparent water vapor supersaturations of5 %–25 % in ultracold cirrus (T<205 K), even in the presence of iceparticles. A variety of explanations for these observations have been putforth, including that ultracold cirrus are dominated by metastable ice whosevapor pressure exceeds that of hexagonal ice. The 2013 IsoCloud campaign atthe Aerosol Interaction and Dynamics in the Atmosphere (AIDA) cloud andaerosol chamber allowed explicit testing of cirrus formation dynamics atthese low temperatures. A series of 28 experiments allows robust estimationof the saturation vapor pressure over ice for temperatures between 189 and235 K, with a variety of ice nucleating particles. Experiments are rapidenough (∼10 min) to allow detection of any metastable ice that mayform, as the timescale for annealing to hexagonal ice is hours or longer overthe whole experimental temperature range. We show that in all experiments,saturation vapor pressures are fully consistent with expected values forhexagonal ice and inconsistent with the highest values postulated formetastable ice, with no temperature-dependent deviations from expectedsaturation vapor pressure. If metastable ice forms in ultracold cirrusclouds, it appears to have a vapor pressure indistinguishable from that ofhexagonal ice to within about 4.5 %.