Jack and Bianca arrived at the Department of Energy’s Southern Great Plains (SGP) Atmospheric Radiation Measurement (ARM) facility on Saturday morning to set up and prep for the next launch. Calling SGP ARM a “facility” is a little misleading because it is essentially a 9,000 square mile swath of north-central Oklahoma and southern Kansas that is well-instrumented for learning about cloud, aerosol, and atmospheric processes. That said, we are at what’s called the Central Facility, which is the heart of the SGP ARM observing region. The Central Facility is a heavily instrumented observatory in the midst of vast agricultural land.
Anyway, back to Saturday morning…. We unloaded balloons, transponders, AirCores, tools, our Picarro AirCore analyzer, and other flight tracking equipment from the chase vehicle into our office that the ARM group is graciously lending to our team for the week. After starting up the Picarro analyzer, we prepped equipment for our next launch, located our helium tanks, and re-charged a LOT of batteries. We also made a trip to Kansas (which is only 45 mins away from the ARM site) to scope out possible launch locations for the following day.
Saturday afternoon saw Sonja Wolter flying from Denver to Oklahoma City to join the AirCore traveling triad for the remainder of the road trip.
