Yes the site is surviving the ravages of its visitors, until now. We are not sure what happens during our open house, we will keep our fingers crossed and thumbs pressed that the visitors respect the great work the MPI and CIMH staff did in establishing such a perfect and well functioning site. For the open house, we did visit the houses up the road and invited the neighbors, and will see how many show up; but we will try to keep things in good shape.
Yesterday we were busy with ACTOS/HELIOS, the ARTE film crew, our soundings and some preparations for our open house as well as the workshop tomorrow at CIMH.
ACTOS Fly-By
ACTOS/HELIO flew for the first time during the 2011 CARRIBA campaign, and focused on the profiling of the lower atmosphere, rather than clouds, as some of its spectrometers are down. We are interested in comparing sondes which generally drift over the island in the Easterlies with the offshore thermodynamic environment. Here having ACTOS low and close is essential. For this we had a very nice fly-by between Ragged and Deebles point at about 50 m (see their post here: first-actos-flight) within minutes of having released a sonde. Here is a picture from Katrin Lonitz showing the fly-by at 50 m or so. The data from this flight should be very useful in connecting offshore aerosol and thermodynamic properties to what we are able to remotely sense. This should give us a good picture of possible differences between the thermodynamic structure just offshore and what we get from the sondes as they go over the Island. We also had a sonde launch an hour earlier, when ACTOS started its flights.
The radar has been functioning well and we spent the morning experimenting with figure eight sweeps after identifying clouds. The cloud field was very well developed under a strong inversion at 700 hPa. Cloud tops rising to 3km and evidence of a dust layer that seemed to mix downward as compared to the day before.
Regarding today’s weather the wind is a bit more northerly, an initial look at the thermodynamic structure suggests otherwise the environment is similar, although the cloud fields appear less well developed. This is evident comparing the GOES east imagery from yesterday as compared to today. Shown below is yesterdays, todays and a blow up of today’s imager.
ACTOS will not be flying today as they focus on getting their spectrometers in working order.
