Monday 25th February
Arrival in Andenes –
the campaign begins!
Weather Outlook: Lee cyclone/polar low west of
Flight plan for tomorrow: Fly over the cyclone, land at Longyearbyen (Spitsbergen) to re-fuel, then fly in the lee
of
Blog
Leaving my
house at 5am this morning I was wondering what had possessed me to fly so early
from Heathrow. The reason of course was
that it takes so long to get up to Andenes that if
you don’t leave early then you end up spending the night in Tromsø
or Bodø.
Twelve hours, four airports and three flights later I arrived in snowy
and windy Andenes. With each flight the aeroplane and airport got
progressively smaller, until we arrived in the darkness to a small wooden
building where you had to pick your luggage straight off the trolleys that they
use to transport it from the plane to the terminal building. Jon Egill (who is
in charge of the campaign) and Gunnar (a forecaster at Tromsø)
and I were met by Gudmund (the project secretary) and
Christian (the PR guy) who was busy snapping photos of the project leader’s
arrival. Happily for us, the 2-man TV
documentary crew who had gone to the military airport to meet our research
aircraft, the DLR Falcon, so we avoided being filmed
until the briefing meeting in the evening.
The Falcon was supposed to have arrived a few hours before us, but was
forced to divert and land at a nearby airport due to the closure of Andenes airport earlier in the day because of ice on the
runway.
After
arriving we went to the dining room for a traditional Norwegian meal – a kind
of mashed potato with vegetables and mutton mixed in, accompanied by a
flatbread. A briefing meeting then
followed, with Gunnar giving us the weather forecast for the next day and Idar and the others outlining the proposed flight. I was asked to show the sensitive area
predictions (non-metos, you can keep reading, I’m
going to explain this!), which in this case show you where you should make
additional observations of the atmosphere to put into your forecast model to
improve the 12-36hr weather forecast for Norway. Everyone was encouraged by the fact that this
sensitive region was over the low pressure system, which is where they wanted
to fly tomorrow. The outcome of the
meeting was a decision to re-convene at 7:30am tomorrow to produce a flight
plan. This will enable us to have a look
at the most recent forecasts and satellite data to see where the low pressure
system has moved to – these systems are not well predicted which is part of the
reason for this field campaign.