14 September 1995
(This was a transit flight from Manaus to Santerem. Therefore, only limited measurements were obtained.)
RF: A quick summary for this leg. We started off in a lot of that real humid haze down around Manaus and sort of typical stuff we were seeing before. Then about half way on the leg here to Santarem we got above a haze layer which was down at about 5,000 ft and above that all the way up it was clear. I guess the humidity must be down or something here, but much cleaner looking air than we've seen before. The particle counts haven't changed very much along the flight and are still pretty low. But the visibility is much better now. It looks like probably 20 to 25 miles in either direction around the airplane. And even descending into what looks like a haze layer, the CNC1 is only 500 to 600 particles per cc. So something is really different about the aerosol around here. We'll try to do some sampling in this on the way out to the next stop. We did try to catch a fire over the jungle a little while back, but we really didn't get ourselves coordinated too well. We passed through the smoke.