24^th February 2008

Campaign Start T-2 days

Weather outlook: Promising for a polar low on Tuesday

I leave for Andenes tomorrow at 5am, having given the taxi driver specific instructions NOT to bang on my front door when he comes to pick me up (don’t think my housemates would appreciate that!). Am all packed and ready to go and join the team in Andenes, who at this moment are probably having a meeting to roughly plan the first flight on Tuesday.

ECMWF ran the sensitive area predictions yesterday for me, as a test. They will be producing SAPs with a lead time of 36hrs, and optimisation times of 12, 24 and 36hrs for a verification region over Scandinavia. Here is the SAP from yesterday, showing a sensitive region to the north of Norway:

It’s good to see a sensitive region in-range of our base at Andenes! The singular vectors put the sensitive region in the mid-Atlantic for this case.

The Norwegians are keeping a good eye on the weather forecasts for Tuesday. There looks to be potential for a polar low to develop, as seen on the Met Office long-range forecast chart that Jon Egill sent me yesterday:

Could the first flight of the campaign be to investigate a polar low? Watch this space!