Daily Summary for 22 January 2007

A storm system passed over southern Ontario during the overnight hours, peaking in intensity right over CARE, just before the CloudSat overpass (~2:30 LT). From a C3VP perspective, this was the ideal scenario - deep (between 500 m and 6 km AGL), precipitating cloud with aircraft and satellite measurements right over the CARE site, which had virtually all instruments up and running. Unfortunately for CLEX, there were no isolated mid-level, mixed-phase clouds to go along with it.

The rest of the day after the flight was partly to mostly clear with some patchy cirrus hanging around.

C3VP sampled a region of deep ice cloud (with light to moderate snowfall at the surface) near the CARE site during the A-train satellite overpass early this morning. Very little supercooled liquid water was observed on this flight. The aircraft was situated over CARE performing a spiral descent and several level, straight leg tracks at varying altitudes for a little over an hour before covering the CloudSat overpass. CLEX did not add on any extra flight hours onto this mission.

Convair instrument update: The CIP did not function on this mission. While Mengistu's w-band radar worked nicely, the Ka-band radar did not operate (cracked lens - will be fixed by the next mission). All other in-situ probes worked well.

Below is a MODIS IR image and CloudSat swath during the aircraft operations.