17 August 1995
PH (Flight Scientist):
Had some instrument problems. The SUN didn't work because the time clock was confused but that's not important; it still recorded the data correctly. Drawing a lot of power, so we didn't operate the lidar. Jack will make a note of some other things I'm sure. But we got out here north of Brasilia and saw a few, not many, smallish fires, fairly white-grayish smoke. We sampled four plumes. On most of those four we did at least two passes either along the length of the plume or across the plume. I think most of them were along the length of the plume. They were very small plumes and we got samples for chemistry measurements and then samples for aerosol and optical properties. But being such small plumes, we are not sure we will get much out of those measurements. So okay for the first flight. We found a few problems. Ray has some concerns about the construction of the humidigraph, which he will note. So that's about it.
RW (Aerosol):
The flight could be broken down into a couple of different areas for me. One is the optical properties, the extinction cell, and it worked pretty good on the set of two plumes where we got enough sample once the flows were adjusted properly. (PH: Which plumes were those, Ray?) I've gotten them written down but I don't remember exactly. The humidigraph (tape ended, turn over). The A3 didn't really show any asymmetry in the few times we got some data, but it'll take a little while to reduce that and look at it. But it's probably a good start.
DS (CCN):
On this flight we took some double CCN measurements and I ended putting a "divide-by-ten" filter in when we were actually sampling the plumes. That kept the concentrations down to a manageable number. The overheating problem we may have solved. The blue ice seems to have kept the instrument running perfectly the entire flight; I haven't had one hiccup as far as the cooling and heating of the device. On further flights we'll see how it does in warmer temperatures.
JR (Engineer):
Well, the Ophir hygrometer didn't work during the whole flight and I'll have to repair that. The 3-way nephelometer hooked to the hygrometer only worked for the last 1 1/2 hour maybe. Everything else seemed to work. There doesn't seem to be sufficient power (110 volts) to operate the lidar with everything else turned on at the same time.
PH: The "3-wavelength neph hooked to the hygrometer." Which hygrometer is that?
JR: The hygrometer.
PH: Which one, I don't know which one you're referring to.
JR: I'm sorry the humidigraph.
PH: So it's the Mark Rood humidification factor instrument.
JR: Yes that's right.
AB (CAR):
Both the zenith and the nadar radiometers worked fine, no problems. We basically got nice signal in all channels and the arms were moving throughout the flight. So in summary, things worked well on this flight.
JL (CAR):
For most of this flight, the CAR door was not able to open and so I turned on the power periodically, probably every 15 to 20 mins just to give it a shake. At the end around 7:30-7:45 Z the door opened. Because it was at the end of the flight there just wasn't much I could do. As far as science goes I didn't get much out of it but otherwise the instrument is working fine.
JSR: The DMPS cold side worked fine, but we are going to have to do a little more work on the hot side. The hot side worked fine the first time we ran it. After that it was just the particles were condensing inside the column, so we will probably try to find a way to permanently put an ice pack to it.
RF (Chemistry):
I don't think the LICOR CO2 was working properly. Taking a mass flow meter out of line didn't give us a true measure of the flow through the instrument. So with this rotometer it actually indicates flow through the instrument when there isn't, so I need to put the mass flow meter back. So basically I think it was sitting there with no flow through it for the entire flight so no CO2 data.
PH: What about the other CO2 instrument, was that recording?
RF: It was recording but it's slow so we don't get much of a signal from that when we go through a plume. We'll plot some of that up after the flight and see if we've got anything useful out of that. If we were in smoke for 30 secs or so we would probably get something. NOx seemed to work okay. Pretty good signal in the smoke. Another thing now as I'm thinking, there's the bag.
Okay. Getting back to flight summary. Let's see we had one continuous sample for Paulo's mercury and Teflon filter for the entire flight. Basically ran that from 15 mins after takeoff until 20:04 Z. With the Teflon, Nuclepore and quartz, one sample on the first plume we hit. That was at 18:02 Z. Another sample from background at 18:30 Z. Another sample for a plume down at 300 ft at 19:12 Z. Basically troubleshot problems with the CO2 not making sense for the rest of the flight and I think we are going to have to do a little bit of plumbing tomorrow morning so we are going to need power on the airplane early.