25 August 1995
PH: A summary of this flight. This was primarily a flight to support the ER-2 measurements north of Cuiaba. After takeoff we headed out to the northwest. We were half an hour late taking off because of airport congestion. That put us behind the curve a bit but we did fly under the ER-2. We saw it flying over us, actually a bit to the east of us. Then we went on towards the northwest in thick smoke, very thick smoke, which thickened up every now and again as we went through various plumes, but there was a widespread heavy smoke layer. We went out at about 8,000 ft or so, I think, and then towards the end, as we approached the northwesterly point, we climbed up to 10,000 or so and did a turn to the west, tried to look at what appeared to be a cumulus cloud but in fact it turned out to be just smoke rising above the general background. Prior to that, we climbed above the top of the smoke in order to get some Valero measurements, then we did a turn to the west heading to that (KM talking to Cuiaba Tower--overriding summary) descended and did a big turn to the east, came back toward the southeast, reciprocal on the track that we went out on, so back on the track that the ER-2 had previously flown (KM talking to Cuiaba Control--overriding summary). That was the end of the first part of the mission. We then started to head back towards Cuiaba. We found a very nice area of uniform forest, where we did a number of banked orbits for CAR reflectivity measurements followed by (KM talking to Cuiaba Tower--overriding summary) continued to head back towards Cuiaba to make radio communication about 50 miles out. Once we made radio communication and established that the airfield was still open we then (KM overriding summary). There weren't too many fires in the area but we found one interesting one produced by burning of trees, which had all ready been felled in straight lines, that they were burning off. We did a number of penetrations of that plume, primarily for physical measurements but I think we got some emission factor measurements as well. The cabin was getting very hot by that time and some of the instruments were being affected. The FPS and various pumps were switching off, so we headed back to Cuiaba.
PH: Art, would you like to do a summary?
AR: Roger. I'll talk about meteorology today. We had a haze layer about 1,000 ft lower than yesterday. In the areas that we did not have fires that was about 7,500 ft. Where we had hot fires they were overshooting turrets to about 10,000 or 10,500 ft. At that level they briefly had droplets, maybe for a minute or two but not longer than that, and I think that we can probably deduce from that that unless we have some major change in the weather that it will take overshooting tops above, say 11,000 ft, to place a cumulus cloud on top of the inversion layer here. We did see something we saw in Kuwait. There were a couple of turrets that we didn't have to penetrate but they did extent to about 12,000 ft. They did have a longer life than cumulus capping clouds and detrained smoke at a higher level and left a completely separate haze layer above the 10,500 ft level that we happened to sample. It was very spotty but it was up around 12,000 ft estimated and it was detrained off in what looked like a slightly different direction than the stuff lower down. It looks like our EG&G dew point temperature is erroneous since it was 10 degrees lower than the airport measurement at takeoff and continued to indicate 30-40[[ring]] temperature dew point differences during much of the flight and I suspect those are erroneous. I guess that's about it. I can't think of anything else.
PH: Okay. Jason?
JL: Valero's machine was up and operating well today and especially had good measurements above the haze layer. For CAR we had a good surface reflectance measurements over the forest. I think that's the only place that's good for the DRDS (KM overriding summary) studies in the northern part of Cuiaba it would be interesting if we fly to the south and do the same thing over the Pantanal.
PH: Are you there, Don?
DS: Okay. CCN seemed to have functioned fine today. No problems as far as overheating. The blue ice is still doing the trick and it lasted the entire flight due to the fact that they started out frozen this time instead of only cool.
PH: Do a quick summary, Ray, before we land.
RW: I took lots of humidigraphs. I don't know if they worked. The temperature was very high on the nephelometer. It was about 47[[ring]]C. I seemed to get pretty good OEC stuff in the plumes. Will just have to see. This is more complex than the others.
PH: What plumes were those, the big ones that we were intercepting on the way out?
RW: Those had actually a lot of smoke. I think I will get something out of those. This last fire just didn't have very much in it.
PH: Okay, Ron. Summarize quickly.
RF: A lot of good regional haze. Filters are really loaded up for chemical analysis for both ours and Paulo's and we got one good emission factor in the smoldering slash burn which is different from the other fires we looked at so far. Other than that, things started crapping out at the end of the flight because it got too hot in the cabin.
PH: What broke down as far as you know, Ron?
RF: DMPS and the breaker on my big bag house pump kept blowing, so that half way through a sample it would stop and I wouldn't know it until I looked at it close.
PH: That was the same problem we had in Kuwait, the bag house pump going out.