18 August 1995
PH: Okay. Let's summarize this flight. Disappointment of this flight was that hardly any fires were seen. No significant smoke, so we were sampling pretty clean air most of the flight. In fact all of the flight, really. We climbed out to 10,000 ft as we headed for our rendezvous beneath the ER-2, which was some 160 miles north of Brazilia. We saw the ER-2 go over us, saw it's contrail, at which point we were below them at about 6,000 ft. We then descended down to about 500 ft or so above the surface. Got aerosol measurements all the way down. Ron did some sampling. Ray got some samples. Got CCN measurements. Then we headed out to intercept the ER-2 on its run back from the east to the west. Saw the ER-2 fly over us again. We were climbing up through the boundary layer up to about 7,000 ft. Then we did four or five circles above the cerrado for CAR reflectivity measurements, with one circle for sky reflectivity measurements, then we were out of time on station and started to head back towards Brazilia. Ray, are you there? Do you want to say anything on the tape about what you got?
RW: Since there wasn't much smoke, it wasn't very eventful. All the equipment seemed to work. But not much aerosol. Didn't get any extinction data other than your nephelometer.
PH: Ron, would you summarize your measurements?
RF: Yes. We concentrated on a background filter sample. After we had done that profile we collected three bags for filter samples. We are running Paulo's Teflon and MOUDI for the entire flight for an integrated sample. The same with the mercury. During the profile, we were just opening the bag and collecting as rapidly as we could to get aerosol size distribution, DMPS and humidigraph measurements.
PH: Do you think there was any improvement in the humidigraph today, Ray? Not quite as hot in the cabin.
RW: It seemed to work fine but the aerosol concentrations were so low that it's hard to tell how much of a growth factor there was. It looked like about 10%.
PH: Okay. Don?
DS: Well, the CCN seemed to function fine today. But most of the flight we got a little bit of lidar data. It seems to be working fine. We didn't see any smoke in it. Very little structure was shown with the lidar. There wasn't anything for it to see.
PH: The lidar was on for just a short period of time when we turned the CCN off. In order not to miss the CCN measurements on our first vertical profile downwards, we then switched the CCN on again.
DS: Yes, that's correct.
PH: Jason?
JL: Yes. First of all Valero's TDDR radiometer. Everything worked fine except the indicator tells me that the arms are turning but just like yesterday it gives erroneous reading. But I looked outside the ring is turning, the arm is turning and also looked at the signals. So for that instrument everything is working perfectly. For CAR it would have been better if I had more turns, but we ran out of time. I just alternated between channel 2 and channel 5. Hopefully, I can do some interpretation to get the whole blue sky radiance.
PH: Yes. I think we will have plenty of chance to do that type of measurement on future flights.
JL: Next time probably I would provide to you the detail of the flight path and how long that would take, that might help.
PH: Okay. Is Jack there?
JR: Yes, I'm here. To the best of my knowledge everything worked okay today. I haven't found any failures and I guess we got the power loading problem, at least we have a handle on it, we haven't got it solved.
PH: Yes, there is still this problem with setting the limits on the SUN display.
JR: Yes, the problem is it seems to buffer up 10 secs of data before it spits it out.
PH: Okay. So that's the summary of the flight. If anything else happens on the way in we will continue the recording.
JL: Can someone give a brief description of the meteorological conditions around here?
PH: We had an easterly flow at about 850 mbars and at the surface. Starting out from Brazilia we had some small, very small, cumulus. They got less as we progressed north and we pretty much ran out of them as we approached our rendezvous with the ER-2. The boundary layer was marked primarily by a maximum in humidity at about 5,000 ft or so. The humidity is now running 70%. I didn't have a continual trace of the temperature so I didn't really see the temperature profile, but just looking at the digital temperature it didn't seem to be much of an inversion as far as I could see. That's about it.