We've been in another groove the last few days. The wind speed has been pretty good, but a good number of the days have been on the wet side. But, given that there is only 4 official field project days left, we've been going full speed ahead nonetheless! We flew Saturday through today (Tuesday), and we plan to fly again tomorrow. That will give us another 5 day stretch of flights one after another. When we get into a routine like that, it makes life not overly exciting from a blog point of view. We leave the house by 8:30, two of us will go over to general aviation for a takeoff around 10 while the other two spend the day in the office working on getting some results and understanding the data. The office is in the Meteo France building at the airport which is quite convenient given that every day at 3 we have a weather briefing from them. We get a look at the forecasted wind speed, direction, rain amount, inversion height, cloud top height, and other parameters useful for our project. Mostly they use the CEP model which is the European mid-range forecast model, also known as ECMWF, along with Arpage which I think is a French model, and Aladin as well. We usually ask them to show us a couple different models so we can get a good idea of how consistent the features are. Some of the forecasters speak english pretty well, but when they don't, it makes it interesting and even comical sometimes. Anyway, back to the routine, we leave the office between 5 and 6 to head home and get dinner. After dinner we may chat and hang out a bit, but then its back to work making leg tables and wind plots. Then we head for bed, wake up and do it again the next day! That type of lifestyle doesn't provide too many exciting photos to share, or awesome stories about day to day life. We did have an adventure last Friday though...
Last week on our down day, Justin, Neil and I went up to Saint Pierre on the northwest coast. It is a small, quaint little town, made famous by the volcanic eruption that wiped out the entire town in the early 1900s. It used to be considered "the Paris of the Caribbean" and in only a few minutes, Mount Pele wiped out the entire town of ~30,000 people. In part for the memory of the people, but also for future protection, they've built an observation center there which is also a pretty neat museum. The building is supposedly earthquake safe, and you can follow along on a guided tour to all of the exhibits and learn about the disaster, and earth science in general.
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| The Earth Science Museum that is Earthquake safe. |
Afterward we spent some time walking around in the town, and grabbed some lunch. The town is filled with ruins from the disaster and a lot of the building rubble left from the aftermath was used to build new houses. Here are a few representative photos from that excursion.
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| The pizza I ordered for lunch...with a raw egg smack dab in the middle...interesting? |
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| Ruins in Saint Pierre. |
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| Water front road in Saint Pierre. |
In other news, Trude came back down to pack up and ship her lidar back to the states. We were hoping that her lidar would provide another useful set of data for the project but unfortunately the lidar had other things in mind. You see, this lidar just really really wanted to be a rain gauge. Soon after she left, it apparently began collecting water. Two weeks later when Trude took it apart to pack it up for shipping, at least 1L of water came out of the "watertight" lidar. Since we weren't expecting quite that much, it made a good sized puddle in the middle of the office. Oops!
As of today, we only have 2 more full research flights to go. I'll likely fly on the King Air tomorrow for the last time. The official end of the project is April 8th, and we'll be heading back to the states on April 10th. One week from today I'll be home! Hopefully in this last little bit we'll have a bit more time to do some fun things. I'd still like to climb Mount Pele, and go to the beach before heading home. Maybe we can have a few more of these too...
:)
