Wdnesday 5^th March

Day of Rest (sort of, anyway)

Weather Outlook: Great weather nr Greenland, but we lose our northerly flow here for at least the next few days.

Flight plan for tomorrow: Who knows?!

Blog

It’s a down day today, and our first chance for a while to have a break from work, so most of us spent the day finding various things to do to avoid working. In this spirit we had an extended breakfast then a few of us headed down to Andenes to a small bakery/coffee shop, where we relaxed for an hour before heading back to the rocket range just in time for lunch! A leisurely afternoon followed, with much less time than usual spent preparing the materials for the 4pm briefing. Idar and Vanda managed to find some weather of interest to fly into tomorrow, and set about planning a flight.

Our kitchen seems to be operating on a rotating 8-day menu, so there’s no new dishes to report. We did get something that resembled chilli yesterday, but without kidney beans in it, but that’s the only new dish the past couple of days.

Weather Round-up

A large synoptic-scale cyclone is hitting southern Norway today, and Bergen has seen significant snowfall. With warm-air advection from the south, the Arctic air has been pushed back further north, and the termperature difference between sea-level and 500hPa is around 30degC in parts where it was 40-50degC a couple of days ago. It looks like we won’t get out northerly flow back until late next week.

There is low level southerly flow over the Finnmark coast, creating strong low-level jets of wind out of the fjords. There may also be wave-breaking in this region. A flight is being planned to investigate this tomorrow, but may be scrapped depending on the latest forecasts tomorrow.

SAP Evaluation

There is a trough-ridge-trough pattern in the 500hPa height at targeting time tomorrow. The SV SAPs for 12hrs optimisation highlights the ridge between Iceland and Norway, between two low pressure systems as the most sensitive region. The SV SAPs for 24 and 36hrs optimisation also highlight the ridge, but at its most northerly extent, north of a low pressure system lying over Iceland. This region, by the north-east coast of Greeland is a baroclinic zone because of the ice edge.

The ETKF SAPs are located in weak upper-level flow, north and west of Andøya for 12hrs optimisation. For longer optimisation times the sensitive region is located in strong upper-level flow, in the region of the upper-level jet, in the trough south of Iceland. It is not unusual for ETKF to be located in such an area, but so far during the campaign it has favoured the region to the north of us, where the baroclinicity has been high.