Daily Summary for 2 December 2006

Yesterday's powerful storm moved rapidly off the East Coast, bringing strong NW winds and plenty of wrap-around moisture. The cold winds brought significant lake effect snows to the entire Great Lakes region. There was plenty of mid-level and high level moisture as well.

The flight targeted the northern end of an Ottawa CloudSat overpass. On the way to the CloudSat operations domain, the Convair-580 passed some nice layered mixed phased "CLEX" clouds. These clouds were sampled nicely by the Ka- and X-band radars and the lidar. We also confirmed the mixed phase structure as we ascended to our flight altitude on our way northward to the overpass domain. As we headed northward, the 2 mixed phase layers turned into 3 layers and then they eventually merged into one deep nimbostratus cloud with echo top near 7 to 8 km and echo bottom all the way to the ground. Nimbostratus up to 8 km filled the CloudSat domain by overpass time. After the CloudSat flights were completed, we headed back south to try to get back into the mixed phase clouds. Unfortunately, much of the two lowest cloud layers had merged and glaciated. We finally made it back into a mixed phase cloud field between 9 kft and 11 kft (and some ice below on radar) but it was dissipating. We sampled the dissipating mixed phase cloud for about 15 minutes with a level flight at cloud top and then porposing through the water cloud depth. After 15 minutes, the cloud field was essentially gone and we could not stay in cloud. We then headed home.

18:15 UTC GOES-12 visible image and CloudSat radar swath courtesy NRL.