Thursday 13th March
Planning
the final assault(s)!
Weather Outlook: The timing of
the cold air outbreak and associated polar low activity seems uncertain
Flight plan for tomorrow: Down
day – Falcon brake part has arrived and will be fitted tomorrow.
Blog
Last night the entire team of scientists and DLR crew headed off to a local restaurant for our not-quite-end-of-campaign dinner. We were served mølja, a traditional north Norwegian dish, consisting of cod fish, cod liver and cod roe. I decided to be brave this time, and try both the liver and roe (which I passed on last time) which weren’t too bad, even if the texture of the roe was odd. After dinner Jon Egill was called upon to give a speech, and he presented DLR with a framed photo of the northern lights, and Gudmund (our indispensible project secretary) with a book on digital photography. DLR also wanted to acknowledge Gudmund’s contribution to making the campaign run so smoothly, and presented him with a framed photo of the white beauty herself – the DLR Falcon. After dinner the party moved location, back to the rocket range, where our German friends provided drinks and music into the early hours. I’ve put some photos of the meal up in a new photo album.
The operations room seemed a little quiet first thing in the morning, with several of the younger members enjoying the fact that this is a down day. Down day or no down day, forecast charts still have to be studied, as we try to figure out the best way of spending our remaining flight hours this weekend. We are not being helped by the lack of predictability shown by the forecasts – every time a new forecast comes in for the weekend, it shows something different to the last one. That, of course, is why we are here, but it’s certainly not helpful. We have 4 flights remaining, but will there be anything to study?
This afternoon our Indian friend Muralidhar left for
The breaking news as I’m about to post this comes from Frank at DLR, who gives us the joyful news that Alex has fitted the spare part for the brakes which arrived a couple of hours ago. The Falcon is ready to take to the skies once again!
Weather Round-up
The 00Z forecasts
looked quite different to the 12Z forecasts from yesterday. The 12Z HIRLAM (20km) forecast has several
transient features developing and decaying rapidly in the northerly flow. The only feature which develops is a polar low
which develops during Friday, to the north of Andenes. This feature deepens and moves east into the
Barents sea, and is located north of the Kola Peninsula at 00Z on Sunday, which
is as far out as these forecasts go. Given
the changeability of the forecasts for the weekend, I’ll save a more detailed
discussion until tomorrow.
SAP Evaluation
The ETKF SAPs highlight the region around
The SV SAPs show more variability with optimization time. For 12hrs optimization time the sensitive
region is in the verification region. This
is probably due to the weak upper-level flow and short optimization time. For 24hrs optimization most of the
sensitivity is also in the verification region, with a smaller region of sensitivity
over a ridge north of the