Daily Summary for 26 January 2007

This was a tale of greatly varying weather leading to two greatly varying flights. Eastern Ontario and western Quebec were under mostly clear skies during the CloudSat overpass, while southwestern Ontario was under the cloud cover of a weak synoptic disturbance.

Pictures taken at CARE at ~16:00 LT by Curtis Seaman:

As a result of the weather, there were two flights today. The first targeted the Kingston CloudSat overpass and focused primarily on the lidar/CALIPSO side of things. The second flight targeted the cloud system over CARE. Since there were multiple cloud layers - a low cloud producing light snow/flurries and mid-level, mixed-phase cloud - this flight was a joint C3VP/CLEX flight. The aircraft performed a spiral descent over CARE during the snow event at the surface then sampled the mid-level cloud north of Barrie, where there were fewer airspace restrictions. The aircraft did encounter icing conditions, making this a good CLEX case.

The aircraft crew reported that this was the best flight yet from a microphysical probes perspective with all probes working well and no major glitches.

Below is a MODIS IR image and CloudSat swath during the aircraft operations, with the location of aircraft operations indicated. Note that CloudSat saw the upward pointing radar from the aircraft (the vertical line in the CloudSat reflectivity plot), indicating that the aircraft was "spot-on" in flying directly under the satellite as intended.