1 September 1995
PH: To summarize this flight, we arrived in good time for both the satellite overpass and for the ER-2 overpass over the sunphotometer in the Pantanal. Again frustrated by this altocumulus, which was fairly extensive today at the top of the smoke layer. However, we proceeded to do a pretty thorough vertical profile, every 1,000 ft from above cloud top down to 500 ft above ground level. Everything seemed to be working fine. Presumably the ER-2 was on time. Would have been a good data set for sunphotometer purposes except they didn't get much view of the sun at all. So pretty much the same as on Wednesday, with the same frustrations. The final frustration being that we had to return to the airport just an hour and a half or so into the flight because it was going up and down from minimums. But we may try a second flight today to see if we can do the same thing without as much problem. Art?
AR: Meteorologically almost tweedle-dee and tweedle-dum between flight 1696 and 1997. The top of the convection was down near the ground again. Apparently due to the heavy haze and cloud over that we had earlier. The top of the convection wasn't reached until 1,500-1,400 ft MSL and from that level also we had homogeneously mixed haze, with the exception of some heavier smoke toward the west end near the ground west of the photometer site. Cloud bases today were slightly higher than two days ago when they were up around 12,400-12,500 ft. Tops a little bit higher as well at 12,800-12,900 ft. Unlike flight 1696, we did not have double haze layer today. There was no indication of any sliver haze layer above the tops of the altocumulus clouds as we saw on 1696. That's about it. Easterly flow to northeast at about 10 knots all the way up.
PH: Okay. Thanks, Art. Ray?
RW: All the equipment worked well. I did 38 "no-bags", 2 humidigrams (1 of the humidigrams showed a little bit of growth about 10%). Single-scattering albedo seemed a little bit lower than it was on Wednesday, maybe 8 or 9% lower. Other than that it was pretty uneventful, very uniform high light scattering levels.
PH: Okay, Ron, are you ready?
RF: Yes. I did pretty well. Got a full load of filters, integrating about every other level or every two levels. Got a lot of good hot and cold DMPS samples. Very interesting aerosol size distribution. On the hot side of the DMPS, there was almost no changes in number but all the particles decreased in size so it looks like particles are composed of a solid center and some sort of volatile coating. Very interesting size distributions. So, all in all a good flight.
PH: Good. I'm glad the DMPS is up. Thanks, Jack, for doing that last night. Is Don there?
DS: Go.
PH: Summarize.
DS: Okay. Well, as in past flights, all of the equipment worked just fine. The lidar data, the TDDR has been working great, CCN is also working.
PH: Okay, Don. Say during what portions of the flight was the lidar and the CCN on.
DS: Okay. Lidar was run from 13:04 to 13:40 UTC. That's the only time that I didn't have the CCN running.
PH: What period was that again? From when to when?
DS: I started lidar at 13:04 and ended it at 13:40 UTC.
PH: Okay. So it was from about 11,000 ft down to about 6,000 ft or so.
DS: Yes, that's probably about right.
PH: Okay. Si-Chee you didn't get much at all did you. Do you want to say anything about the flight?
ST: Yes, not much except the instrument works pretty good, but I think the data is not much use to me today.
PH: I think this flight gave you a good idea of the sort of smoke we have in this area. Very uniform and quite thick. This is pretty typical of the cerrado.
ST: Yes, quite true. If we can get the no-cloud sky this afternoon, that will be perfect though.
PH: Si-Chee, I think when you see this smoke from the air you get a feel for how important it could be climatologically.
ST: Yes, sure.
PH: So we're heading in to land at Cuiaba now. We'll keep the instruments on.