At today's 3pm science meeting, preliminary results from the 12/04 CST "severe clear" flight were shown. Rich Ferrare showed a comparison of colocated LASE, CART Raman Lidar, Cryo in-situ, and WFF chilled mirror sonde profiles versus a Vaisala sonde profile; this Vaisala sonde showed a dry bias with respect the other profiles above 6 km. Rich commented that when all of the datasets are compiled, an additional ~5 profiles can be added to this plot. Dave Whiteman showed comparisons of GSFC Raman, CART Raman, and Vaisala sonde profiles, with the the two lidar systems agreeing well in all cases, and with a slight moist bias with respect to the Vaisala sonde at ~10 km. Dave Tobin showed good agreement between a temperature profile derived from SHIS radiance spectra during a spiral down maneuver to those from coincident radiosondes.
Weather:
Skies became mostly clear at mid-day and into the evening. Beginning ~1800 CST, some
thin cirrus moved south over northern Oklahoma. Patchy thin cirrus at
11-12 km was seen for the duration of the flight, but is not expected
to impact the water vapor measurements and comparisons.
Instrument | Status/Comments | CART site: | CART Raman Lidar | Normal operations. Had a power failure earlier in the day and the system was back on line at ~1330 CST. | GSFC Raman Lidar | Normal operations from 2030 to 0200 CST. | MPI DIAL | Operated from ~1830 to 0200 CST. Excellent data set. | WFF Chilled Mirror Sondes | Launches at 2015, 2315, 0115 CST. | Other | Vaisala sondes at 1730, 2030, 2330 ... CST. | DC-8: | LASE | Normal operations. | DLH | Normal operations. | Cryo frost-point/chilled-mirror | Normal operations. | SHIS | Normal operations. | COAST | Normal operations. No COAST specific flight patterns. | AeroSapient | See Recap above. | Proteus: | NAST-I | Normal operations. | NAST-M | Normal operations. | FIRSC | Normal operations. |