aPOCalypse now

On the night of sunday to monday, I was supposed to go on another midnight-to-noon flight, but on sunday morning the 'bosses' here get a message from the airport here saying that they don't have enough fuel to fuel our research airplane on top of the regularly scheduled commercial aircraft. What airport runs out of fuel?? Especially when they have known for months that they are going to have an extra flight load? Only in South America.

People here were pretty upset (especially because the satellite images showed a very promising cloud deck), but needless to say we had to take a mandatory day off between flights, and wait for a shipment of fuel to come in. More about this day off in a later post, because me and two co-workers definately took advantage of this, and went on the most beautiful day excursion!!!

Either way, the night of monday to tuesday it was then my turn to report to work again, to fly our midnight-to-noon mission. At 3 am we were done fuelling, and sitting on the tarmac ready for take-off: the pilots were trying to talk with the tower for take-off. However, no answer came from the tower. After 15 minutes of calling: still no answer. Finally, the pilot re-opened the airplane door, got out, and ran over to the tower to see what was going on - they were sleeping!! What on earth? At what airport do the people working in the tower fall asleep? Especially since we've been flying these 3 am take-off flights for 2 weeks now? Again - only in South America.

Either way though - after take-off, the flight turned into an awesome science mission! We found some great clouds, especially the kind that we came down here to study - pockets of open cell clouds, or POC's:

This is a satellite image of a region with POCs - see how with the POCs, the cells are open, whereas the more 'normal' stratus deck has closed cells. These regions with open cell structure are hypothesized to be associated with lots of drizzle and depleted aerosol concentrations. What causes this? Also, you can imagine that that kind of a cloud deck has a very different effect on the earth's solar radiation budget than a closed cloud deck, therefore very much of interest to climate scientists. Just look at this image, where a hole in the cloud deck allows the sun's rays to peep through:

(image courtesy of Tony Clarke)

Here are some figures of the types of flights we did through these regions, to get good samples of the aerosol, and the cloud dynamics and structures of these POCs. Looks sort of like a ride on a roller coaster - don't get nauseated :)

(figures courtesy of Rob Wood)

The flight scientists were extatic (almost annoyingly so :) ) that we found a bunch of these types of clouds to fly through and collect data from. Every day, at 10:30 am, we have our daily science meetings with every one here. We go over all the flights, and any interesting science found during that flight, and of all the other flights (there are 4 research aircraft based here in Arica now, and one other in a town little further south - Iquique).

At todays' debriefing, the main research scientist on yesterday nights' flight, in all his excitement, offically called and archived that mission as "aPOCalypse now" ...

I work with a bunch of nerds.