In a Routine and Nearing the End

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.

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.

The pizza I ordered for lunch...with a raw egg smack dab in the middle...interesting?

Ruins in Saint Pierre.

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...

:)

5 Days, 5 Flights

This ends the long string of 5 flights in 5 days.  It has been the best week of the field campaign so far.  Sunday was ok, Monday was great, Tuesday was even better, and Wednesday was pretty good too!  Today was interesting in its own right, but not necessarily all that useful for what we hoped to find in the field trip.  The trade winds have stayed strong and easterly but unfortunately we've gotten a lot of moisture up our way lately.  It will be sticking around for a few days.  The final day of the project is May 8th and we still have 6 flights to go.  I believe that makes it 6 flights in 9 days (after counting out the down day tomorrow) so it will be a pretty busy week next week too.

Today Martinique got the most continuous rain I have ever seen in my entire life.  It has rained, and rained, and rained...in fact, the highway in the other direction was blocked off on our way home today due to the river coming over the road.  This is the radar image from this morning for Martinique:

Pretty much the entire island is getting rained on simultaneously.  But it wasn't just Martinique getting the rain...Dominica got a fair share too as well as Saint Lucia.  See the larger scale image below:

It is actually still raining as I write this and it is supposed to rain even worse tomorrow.  So even though it will be a down day and we can relax a bit, we unfortunately won't be able to relax on a beach.  The flight that we took today probably sampled more clouds than all of the previous flights combined!  I'd include a photo of the flight...but it would just be white.

Success!!!

While we were crossing our fingers for Sunday, Monday(today) actually turned out to be the real gem.  Today was my first flight as mission scientist so of course I get to take all of the credit for the great conditions.  The trade winds were about 8 m/s at low levels and directly from the east.  There were even scattered trade wind cumuli advecting toward the island, some of which were precipitating making today the perfect DOMEX day.  We flew the regular flight track pattern but dropped off leg 6 cross island to add another convective racetrack.  We penetrated quite a few legs on both the upwind and lee side of Dominica, encountering up to about 7 m/s updrafts.  It was a bumpy ride but hopefully it will get worse.  I got a little bit out of control with the picture taking and took over 600 photos!  Dan gave me the idea of doing a sort of time lapse in-flight photo where you see the cloud approaching and then penetrate it so I gave that a try a few times.  Really cool.  I'll include a sampling of some of the photos I took.  Note how much nicer they are when they're not out of a polarized window!

A precipitating cumuli upstream of Dominica.

Rain splattering across the windshield.

The well developed cloud deck over Dominica.

When we're really busy I haven't been great about updating every day.  I've been trying for at least every other day but sometimes that doesn't even happen.  So as for the longer term updates, Dan left us last Thursday, while Neil joined us on Friday.  Saturday wasn't an official down day, but we didn't fly because the winds were still variable.  We had the Wyoming crew over for dinner again on Saturday night and had a nice time eating and chatting with them.  It wasn't as animated of a gathering as the first Wyoming dinner, but still quite fun.  Sunday morning brought the more torrential rains I've seen in my entire life and I am not exaggerating.  Not only was it raining really really hard, but it continued for over an hour!  I'll include a photo out the back for reference.  Normally we can see way past the airport runway but during the rain we couldn't even see across the street.  We flew later that day but surprisingly enough there wasn't much going on.  Before takeoff it looked like it would be a pretty good orographically triggered day but it turned out to be quite dry.  The rain that was there that morning passed on quickly  We barely penetrated any clouds during the entire flight and it was overall a pretty boring research flight even though the winds were much better.

Torrential rains with decreased visibility.

We're planning on flying again tomorrow.  The forecast shows the winds getting increasingly strong and turning slightly northerly to be in the perfect 80 degree direction.  One of the models even showed 25 knots (12 m/s) for tomorrow and the next day!  However, along with the strong winds will come a fair bit of mid-level moisture.  It seems that our trade wind inversion might weaken and deeper convection may dominate.  To get ahead of this incoming moisture we schedule tomorrow's flight to be an 8:30 takeoff.  As Ron put it, "it'll either be a complete success or a complete failure."  Normally we check the visible satellite image, the radar, the wind speed and direction, the sounding and the netcams before making a decision about whether or not we'll fly.  However, because of the early nature of tomorrow's flight, it is already a go, and the time is fixed.  Last time MeteoFrance forcasted a deep convective day, it turned out to be a day like any other.  We'll see if they get it right this time.

So as it stands now, we're in a much better position than we were even yesterday!  We finally met a project objective and it is looking good for the long term forecast.  It will likely be a very busy next couple of days.

Crossing Our Fingers for Sunday!

Yesterday was a down day so we spent the first half of the day in Fort-de-France.  That is the name of the capital city on Martinique, and while we've been here on the island for almost 3 weeks and work only 15 minutes out of the city, we still had not been to FDF.  To make things more interesting we drive to Trois Islets and left from Point-de-Bout on a ferry over to FDF.  For a capital city, it had a small town feel.  The roads were narrow and well traveled and formed sharp edged blocks filled with people and little store fronts selling anything from clothing to KFC.  We visited the market which had an enormous selection of rum punches, brightly colored fabrics, and any spice you can think of.  To finish off the day we ate at a cute sidewalk bistro with deliciously made fish.

Justin and Dan in FDF.

View of FDF as the ferry approached the city.

We made it back into the Met Office for our daily 3pm weather briefing just in time to hear some more awful news about the weather.  We're in a really bad trend right now but we have hope for Sunday!  Hopefully by the end of the weekend the winds will shift more easterly and pick up in speed.  In the mean time, here are some views on our commute to work each day.

Poor little bird in the way of the lawn mower down the street from us...I assume it survived.

Sugar cane harvesting.

Traffic on the way into work.

From our house to the Met Office it is only about a 10 minute drive, but if we leave at the wrong time, it can take much longer.  At least the view of the mountains and cane fields are pretty along the way!  Everything is so green here.


Despite the weak winds, we've continued to fly at a slow pace so we don't get too far behind in flight hours.  We flew again today and it ended up being another example of a thermally driven case rather than an orographically forced one.  We tried a new flight track on the west side of Dominica to get in close to hopefully see some of the wake structure.  Some of my photos from the flight are included below.

Picture perfect trade wind cumuli upstream of the island...except for the polarized window in the way.

A great vantage point of the cloud deck over the island sheared to the east due to the westerly flow aloft.

A more zoomed out view of Dominica showing the suppressed convection around the island.

Tomorrow is another down day.  There is really no point in flying so we'll likely get some work done in the office instead.  We'll rest up a bit such that by time Sunday comes we'll be ready for multiple flights in a row with the stronger easterlies that are headed our way.

A String Of "Poor" Weather

The last couple of days we have been stuck in a string of poor weather.  Not poor in the way it was poor last week however.  Last week we had a large disturbance propagate up from South America.  The whole region was wet and the usual trade wind inversion was nearly non-existent.  This allowed the convection to go to very high levels.  The weather was therefore wet, completely overcast, and humid; not the typical situation we were hoping to sample.  We have the exact opposite problem now.  The trade winds are nearly non-existent which allows for thermal heating and convection over the islands.  Instead of an orographically driven system we have a thermally driven one.  The atmosphere is much drier, and while clouds over the island are common, there are very few over the ocean upstream of Dominica.  It is more comfortable in that the skies are clear and the air isn't as sticky, but it isn't good for DOMEX.

We are always very conscious of the time passing.  We have a certain number of flight hours to be used from April 4nd to May 8th and if they are not used, they go wasted.  Therefore, while we'd like to only fly on good days, we simply have to keep flying on these poor weather days to keep from falling impossibly far behind.  Ron and Dan noticed yesterday while flying that the convection was mostly thermally driven so mid-flight they switched the flight tracks to just run racetracks around the mountains of Dominica.  They sampled a lot of non-precipitating clouds on tracks 3 and 4 which should give us a lot of good data.

View of Dominica out the front of the aircraft.

A clear LCL seen over Dominica.

The photos above are Dan's from the flight yesterday on the 18th of April.  They contrast strongly with my photos in flight from the 14th which were included on my last post.  Notice that there are no clouds over the ocean; they are only over the island.  Today will likely look similar to yesterday.  Setting into the project we wanted to have a good number of "regular" cases and perhaps a few anomalous ones.  Instead we seem to be getting plenty of anomalous cases: wet, dry and weak wind, but hardly any "regular" ones.  We have some hope that later this week and into the weekend might be better.  The model forecasts show the wind speed picking up and turning more easterly, along with a bit more moisture.  Cross your fingers for us!

April 17th

It is so hard to keep up to date on here when there is so much going on during the day AND at night!  For a quick list, Wednesday night we had the Wyoming crew over for dinner, Friday night we had the Yale group over for dinner, Thursday and Friday we flew, and yesterday (Saturday) was a down day.  The past couple days the wind speeds have been weak and the direction has either not been consistent, or it has been too northerly or southerly.  We don't want to get too far behind in flight hours so we still flew Thursday and Friday even though the conditions were not ideal.  It doesn't look much better for the next couple days so we've decided not to fly today (Sunday) as well.  Hopefully tomorrow will be better.  Today we'll have an internal science meeting to discuss "The State of the Project."  We'll see what we've found so far, remind ourselves of what we hoped to find, and discuss what else we'd like to look into.

Here are a few photos of the flight from Friday.  There was a stratus layer up above us that produced a steady light precipitation over the entire region.  Even with this upper layer dynamics, the lower levels were still controlled by the orographic lifting of air over the island.  That is my best excuse for the poor quality of the following photos...

Rain Shaft!

KH instability above through my polarized window.

Flight track on my science display.

Not all days are grey like the one above.  It is sunny occasionally!

Saint Anne

April 12th

I bet you'll like this post...I have so many photos to include!  First things first though; I promised some of Ron's photos from the first few flights.

A view of Dominica out the right side of the aircraft.  Also notice the cloud physics instrumentation on the wing!

Another view of Dominica

Me with my data display in the back seat of the plane.

We took our first "day off" today being that the weather wasn't great for flying.  The clouds were too deep and convective, and were due to a disturbance from the south.  The overcast sky and poor visibility made it a bad day to visit Mount Pele, so instead we decided to visit the Trinite-Caravelle weather station.  This station sticks out on a peninsula into the Atlantic ocean on the east coast of Martinique.  It is a great station for giving valuable information about the strength and direction of the uninterrupted trade winds.  We drove most of the way there but the last bit had to be on foot and we decided to make a hike out of it and loop back around on a trail.  Unfortunately we were unable to see the weather station up close and personal BUT we got to see a ton of other great things.  On this little penninsula, there were so many different ecosystems!  We passed a region that consisted of bushy-brush type vegetation, then crossed into a rainforest type area, then a coastal region with cliffs, and finally a low lying tidal plain!  We got to see a lighthouse with a great view of the surrounding, tons of crabs and beautiful flowers.  It was wet, muddy, sticky, humid and tropical, but nonetheless it was a great success.  With the exception of a few sunburns on a completely overcast day, it was thoroughly enjoyed by all.

Justin looking out at the Trinite Caravelle weather station.

Rob's masterpiece.

Ron, Justin and I at one of the bay inlets along the cliffy coastline.