27 August 1995
PH: Okay, I'm going to summarize this flight briefly. Started off with a coordinated flight with the ER-2 as we headed out towards the northwest of the Cuiaba area. Very nice uniform regional smoke. Not many local plumes, in fact, we saw hardly any. So it should be more aged smoke than we have looked at on earlier flights. We got some good measurements as we climbed up through the smoke and got on top of it. At the time the ER-2 was scheduled to go over us we were in the smoke, popped the bottom, and then climbed up into the thickest part of the smoke. We then headed up toward the northwest point. Two smoke layers, a thicker layer below, and a thinner layer above that. We passed through both layers. It was not confirmed that the ER-2 was flying over us. We tried to contact them but had no response. We didn't see them. After that we headed back towards Cuiaba to establish radio contact and found out that the airport was still open. This gave us another hour or so of flight time so we did a vertical profile over the No. 1 NASA sunphotometer located at INPE. Starting at about 500 ft above ground, we climbed up and sampled at 2,000 ft intervals to 9,500 ft, cleared the top of the smoke, and then did a spiral down to 3,500 ft over INPE. Should have got good aerosol chemical measurements. Did one humidigraph. The only thing that upset it was that the Valero radiometer got switched off about half way through our 7,000 ft level. It got switched on again for the latter part of the profile. So it should be a pretty good day's measurements. Didn't do any individual plumes. Did a couple of other useful things. Okay, Ray. Summarize quickly.
RW: Because the uniform nature of the smoke, the OEC didn't get too much use. However, the nephelometer, which does not work well in individual plumes, worked pretty well in this uniform smoke, so I think we've got the same aggregation. Took lots of "no-bag" samples, in fact 61 of them. All of the equipment worked. That's about it.
PH: Did you get any A3, any surprises there?
RW: I can't really tell. Some non-noisy data. It works better at higher concentrations but I'll just have to see when I go back.
PH: Okay, just say what you did with the humidigraph today to test it out.
RW: I ran three humidigraphs. The first one was run before the plane heated up and before the nephelometer heated up and it's the same conditions with which we ran a test aerosol. It worked using sodium chloride so hopefully maybe some time in the future we can try putting test aerosol in during flight.
RF: Oh, let's see we've got one, two, three filters in that regional haze, some were multiple bag filters, some were single bag.
RF: (RS overriding summary) DMPS on the bag was not working too well. Should have good CCN for all the filter samples.
PH: The DMPS was working okay at the beginning of the flight, wasn't it?
RF: No, it started giving us problems shortly after takeoff because it got so hot.
PH: Okay. Do you know if Vanderlei's instruments were working today.
RF: Let me ask Jeff. Yes, they worked fine today, Peter. Well we did that profile of the sunphotometer and collected one Teflon filter at every altitude. So we got five Teflon filters in that profile.
PH: Was that it, anything else other than the Teflons?
RF: No, just Teflons. We wanted to get good masses.
PH: Okay, good. Don?
DS: Yes. The CCN seemed to work fine today.
DS: (RS overriding summary) It quit so we had to start it up again so we lost a little bit of data but I got it going again. We got a couple of tapes.
PH: So the computer had problems?
DS: Just at the very beginning. I got it going again and it only took a minute or two.
PH: But that was on the vertical profile at the end of the flight, not at the beginning.
DS: That is affirmative.
PH: So at the beginning we also got good lidar data right up through the regional smoke.
DS: Yes. At the time we had that running. It ran fine up to then.
PH: And you saw both smoke layers in the lidar data, didn't you?
DS: Yes.
PH: Okay, Art.
AR: We had a mixed layer from the surface to the tops of the boundary layer about 7,500 ft. A clear gap of several hundred feet with a new haze layer, a second haze layer, up around 8,800 to about 9,300 ft, about 400 ft thick. So the top of the boundary layer was closer to 8,000 or 8,500 ft.
AR: (RS overriding summary) layer indicating the overshooting tops that are depositing the higher smoke at that level. We found the bottom of the haze layer in the vicinity of the ER-2 intercept at about (RS overriding summary).
AR: And I don't think I'll say too much more. Winds light and variable.
PH: Why did you refer to the upper haze layer as new smoke? Do you think that may have been fresher than the lower layer?
AR: I'm glad you asked that. Actually what I meant to say is that it represented smoke with a different temperature history. I suspect that was smoke that came from hotter fires and probably was not new smoke.
PH: But you think it was hotter fires closer to our location or farther away, or is it likely to be younger smoke or older smoke than the regional smoke that we were sampling?
AR: My guess would be that it would be about the same age. It was older smoke probably the same age. Deposited up there maybe (RS overriding summary) by hotter fires of yesterday. The exception was the main plume that we intercepted from the hot fire that (RS overriding summary) location.
RF: Say, Art, incidentally something you said about maybe that was old smoke that was pushed up there. It seemed to me looking at the (RS overriding summary) really large particulate stuff and I wondered if maybe it was cloud-processed stuff from an earlier cumulus or something.
AR: I think that's an excellent observation because the higher stuff is likely to have had a (RS overriding summary).