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Daily Summary for 25 February 2007

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Weather Summary — Flight Summary — Satellite Images — Surface Observations — Model Analyses — Radiosonde Soundings

Weather Summary

The major storm system over the central US continued to move slowly toward the northeast - towards southern Ontario. Out ahead of the system was a band of cirrus followed by a large area of mid-level cloud cover. Behind that was precipitating nimbostratus. There was even some cumulonimbus back in the US with reports of thundersnow.

Click here for the CARE operations summary. (Word Document)

Flight Summary

Today's flight targeted the afternoon CARE overpass. Sampled during the satellite overpass was an isolated layer of weakly forced altostratus cloud with little cloud above or below it. After the CloudSat overpass the cloud deck was sampled for awhile over the CARE ground site before the Convair had to head back to Ottawa. Overall this was one of the best CLEX-cloud flights of the C3VP campaign.

Below is the 1815 UTC GOES visible image and CloudSat swath during the aircraft operations courtesy of NRL.

Satellite Images

Images are taken every four hours beginning at 0045 UTC.

GOES-12 Visible (during daylight hours) and Near IR (night) albedo from CIRA.

GOES-12 IR (10.7 µm) brightness temperature from CIRA. The color scale begins at 0 °C with an increment of -10 °C between color changes.

GOES-12 experimental cloud phase from CIRA. Blue represents ice particles, red is liquid droplets above freezing and yellow represents supercooled liquid droplets. Gray areas are clear (no cloud) based on an IR cloud mask.