5 September 1995
PH: Okay. We'll start summarizing. This flight was pretty much dedicated to a vertical profile over the NASA sunphotometer site at Jamari located at 9.18[[ring]] S 63.18[[ring]] W. We sampled at 13,000, 11,000, 9,000, 7,000, 5,000, 3,000, 2,000 ft and ended up at 1,500 ft horizontal legs 5 miles in extent on either side of the sunphotometer. Didn't quite get down below the smoke base and although we got on top of the main smoke layer at 13,000 there was still a very thin layer maybe 2,000 ft above that. On the way out we tried getting a few cumulus, but we had hoped to look at more cumulus aerosol-cloud interactions after the profile but again we had a very short flight today. Okay. Ray, are you ready to summarize?
RW: Yes. I don't have too much to say. Took 30 "no-bag" samples. And the single-scattering albedo nephelometer did change with altitude or it seemed to, it was real. It was wider near the surface where the RH was higher. And let's see, the preheater on the humidigraph wasn't working so we've got a couple of humidigrams when we were up high and they did seem to show a little bit of growth at 20% and that's about it.
PH: Art, you go ahead.
AR: Okay. Today we had our most prolific moisture as far as the project goes. Cloud bases at 4,600 MSL, bases 21 Celsius. Isolated pockets of convection. Apparently the extremely thick smoke cutting off most of the heating enough that cumulus were only allowed to develop in a few isolated areas and where they did they had enough buoyancy to pop through the inversion and develop into full fledged Cbs. Some tops over 30,000 ft and we went through a very vigorous but short lived Cb that topped out at probably 20,000-25,000 ft ultimately, and we went through an updraft of perhaps about 10 meters per second, extremely dense cloud and smoke and boundary layer effluent thrown up well above the top of the haze layer, which seemed to be in the 13,000-15,000 ft area with a gradual dropoff around 8,000-9,000 ft. And other than that no turbulence outside that one particular cumulus cloud. I think that was about it. We had light easterly winds.
PH: Okay, Art. What do you think was the average cloud cover over the sunphotometer site during our profiles.
AR: Over the photometer site I was estimating consistently less than 10%.
PH: Okay. So that should be a good one for the profile over the photometer.
AR: Right. There were only a couple of cloud clusters and they were well away from it.
PH: Okay, Ron.
RF: It looked to me like there were two distinct (smoke) layers with a change at about 8,000 ft, which worked out perfectly for the 8 levels we chose. So I collected a full set of filters at the upper level in relatively clean old smoke and then another full set in that layer below 8,000 ft. And it looked to me like that was the stuff we saw yesterday where there is old smoke aloft, but the new stuff from the local area hasn't mixed up to that level. It's only about half way up there and it seemed to me that that break point was about 8,000 ft both yesterday and today.
PH: Okay. Good observation, Ron. I certainly noticed that about 8,000 ft. It wasn't very thick but it was quite pronounced. Okay, Jack. Any problems?
JR: Well the radio altimeter didn't work at all during the flight plus the humidigraph preheater is shot, but I'm happy to report that the audio tape ran perfectly.
PH: Okay. That's the end of our summaries. Just coming in to land.