April 11th

The last few days have been really busy!  After our scrubbed flight on Friday, ATC permissions came through and we have already gotten 2 complete flights with the altitudes and locations Ron originally was hoping for.  Justin got a chance to fly Saturday, and Rob on Sunday.  Both days were a little on the dry side but the King Air did intersect some rain shafts on both, and the convection remained controlled by the orography.  We've been scrambling to get the quick look data sets online and start to do a bit of a comparison between the flights.  Both flights showed the wind directions approximately Easterly as desired, but the low level trade wind speed was a bit lower than usual.  In the future we will try to fly on more "disturbed" days to get some deeper convection and more precipitation.

DOMEX crew.

 This afternoon we are equally busy but with a different focus.  We are hosting and participating in a "Lesser Antilles Mesoscale Weather Workshop."  There will be 2 hours of lectures, a tour of the aircraft, and a reception.  Ron will give an overview of our project, Dan will talk about the modeling side of our research, and Justin, Rob and I will each give a quick look at data collected over the past week and some of the things we can measure with the aircraft.  Some local scientists will also participate, and the audience will consist mainly of Meteo France employees and associates.  I've got to go fix up my powerpoint but I'll attach some of Ron's in-flight photos a bit later so stay tuned.