The Beginning

Sunday morning Ron went on a test flight with the Wyoming crew while the rest of us worked at the Met Office.  Around the time he came back, it was time to pick Justin up from Fort de France.  He took a ferry from Dominica to Martinique and arrived just in time for a quick lunch, and a trip to the beach!  We drove to Saint Luce and took a swim in the warm Caribbean waters.  It wasn't the typical tropical beach; the shoreline consisted of trees up to the waters edge making a perfect shady spot to avoid the strong sunlight.  The tide was high, the waves large, and the water oh so warm!  Afterward we traveled further into town for a nice French style dinner.  It was starting to feel like a vacation until...

The Ferry from Dominica to Martnique

Beach in Saint Luce

Monday arrived and the workload began.  We went into the Met Office early and worked away all day trying to make a dent on the enormous amount of plots, quick look data sets, derived quantities and other parameters important for understanding the flights.  While Sunday's flight was only a test flight, it was useful for practicing with and for writing the many matlab scripts needed in the long run.  We had our first weather briefing with the met office staff and found it extremely useful.  Their model forecasts will likely be a large part of the decision of whether to fly or not.  We also had a meeting with part of the Wyoming crew.  A similar meeting will take place daily at 3 to keep everybody up to date.

The conference room in the Met Office that we use as our work space.

Sigrid has been doing a great job keeping us well fed!  She arrived with a plethora of sandwich supplies just in time for lunch, and cooked a fantastic dinner complete with chicken, rice, broccoli and salad.  Considering all of the food has been cooked in a tiny little kitchenette, I can't wait until we move into the house on Friday.  With more space, dishes, and a place to store food, the meals are bound to be fantastic.  I also made my first trip to the grocery store today.  Their produce section was huge, they had a large variety of cheese, extremely cheap wine, and some interesting tropical flavors in juices and jams.  The two "best" findings were a beer with 11.6% alcohol content, and a large container of pickled pig parts.  Unique.

Tuesday will likely be a flight day if conditions hold up.  Ron and Dan will be the lucky passengers while Justin, Rob and I continue to work on the data processing.  Hopefully we'll get our first flight in, our first quick look data set created, and make some more progress on some of the plots that will be useful for characterizing the flight legs. 

Dan and Tatoon getting friendly with each other.

The beach at sunset.