14 September 1995
(This was a transit flight from Santerem to Maraba. Therefore, only limited measurements were obtained.)
8:52 PM
RF: Looks like we are flying over a very thin layer of smoke and it's down at about 4,000 or 5,000 ft. Very good lidar imaging, there should be some interesting data from the CAR scanning downward. It looks like a very thin layer that doesn't extend to the ground. And it just shows up as a real nice image on the lidar. We're restricted to 9,000 ft because we're flying off the airway in a more direct route to Maraba. So, I'm going to use this time up here to do some instrument calibrations and a few DMPS samples of the clean air. CCN is down. It overheated on the last flight and we are out of blue ice, so we won't be able to run that.
9:29 PM
Well, if this flight is at all typical of what we're seeing here is a completely different situation than what we saw in the Cuiaba/Porto Velho area. There we had smoke mixed pretty uniformly throughout the boundary layer to 14,000 ft. Around here we seem to have stratified layers of smoke and the stratification seem to be associated with individual fires. In addition, it doesn't mix very high. It looks to be that most of the smoke is below 5,000 ft and there is a lot of both horizontal and vertical variability to it. So, on the way in here, we are going to try and spot a few fires and get an idea of where they are, so that working from Maraba we know where we might go to look for individual fires in a couple of days.
About the only thing we are going to get useful out of this flight is to profile into Maraba, so let's try to keep our measurements going just as long as we can.
10:23 PM
Well, since we had to come over to Maraba IFR, we were restricted to 9,000 ft. On this final approach in, we hit the top of this smoke layer about 6,000 ft and grabbed a bag for hot and cold DMPS. Concentrations here are very high. Much higher CN that we saw in the Porto Velho region. And, as we come in during the night here, we can see remnants of fires. We have probably seen something on the order of 100 in the last half an hour. It just looks like every few miles there is another one. So, there should be no trouble to find some individual plumes to work in this area. We didn't collect any filters on this flight. Basically, we have been out of the smoke for all but the last 10 mins. And concentrations so low that it would have not been possible to collect and measure them on the filters. Real good lidar data all during the track.