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Daily Journal Entries : Judy | Paquita
Instrumentation: all working
Aircraft in vicinity: KingAir, C130, UKMet
SJ experienced an exciting day today! Two convective cells were well sampled by both the ship instrumentation and multiple aircraft.
At 1314Z we received the first echoes on the noaa K radar of a shower that we were in for almost an hour. Initially the convective cell was on the port side of the boat, then moved over the boat, providing good data to the vertically-pointing instrumentation for a solid hour. The cell thereafter moved to the starboard side and was well-sampled by the noaa K radar. The C130 and KingAir planes joined the shower at about 1324Z. We tried to chase the cloud, but failed to keep up.
At 1528Z the C130 (and maybe the King Air ?) were nearby in another shower, to the port side of the boat (thus the convection was outside the range of the noaa K radar). The shower arrived at the SJ at about 1537Z. We swung the boat around, and this time we were able to track with the (slowly-moving) cell. The noaa K sampled this cell for about an hour, up to about 1700 Z. We think the C130 and maybe the King Air continued to work the same cloud. It was very satisfying to us that this time we could successfully chase the cloud of interest.
After this excitement we returned to our line. The day cleared and both the lidar and noaak radar shut off at 20Z (4pmLT).
The soundings showed weak winds (1-4 m/s) throughout the depth of the BL and immediately above. The inversion at 650-600 mb throughout the day was striking - a drop in RH from 75% at 650 mb to near 0 at 600 mb, along with a temperature inversion of about 2.5 K. Coincident with this, cloud tops appeared fairly smooth to the radar.
Regards,
Paquita
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