Daily Summary for 17 January 2007

After a warm end to December and beginning of January for the eastern third of the US, winter returned with a vengeance just in time for the start of IOP III. While an ice storm was stranding most of the world's meteorologists at the AMS conference in San Antonio, TX and distressed citizens were removing trees from their cars in Detroit, the CARE site got heavy lake effect snow and Ottawa got some bitterly cold air. By the time of the first scheduled flight, however, most of the interesting weather over southern Ontario was departing or dissipating. Some lake effect snows lingered north of Barrie, but nothing remained of interest to CLEX.

With no CLEX clouds and the C3VP group more interested in working out the kinks in the newly installed W-band radar on the aircraft as well as fixing some other instrumentation issues that have popped up, the decision was made to cancel today's overpass flight.

We did, however, fly a practice mission later in the day, which went rather smoothly. The 2D-S probe worked well and the extinction probe seems ready to go. We flew out over scattered regions of broken mixed phase clouds NNW of Ottawa for a simulated CloudSat mission. Lidar observations showed up to five layers of supercooled water present at times. The pilots performed well (one new pilot being trained) during the flight. Takeoff was at 3 PM EST and landing was just after 5 PM EST.