{"id":388,"date":"2018-08-13T02:44:48","date_gmt":"2018-08-13T02:44:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/ciresblogs.colorado.edu\/aircore\/?p=388"},"modified":"2018-08-20T18:19:35","modified_gmt":"2018-08-20T18:19:35","slug":"weathered-out","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ciresblogs.colorado.edu\/aircore\/2018\/08\/13\/weathered-out\/","title":{"rendered":"Weathered Out"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Wednesday \u2013 Thursday, August 1-2, 2018<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Wednesday dawned with cloudy skies and rain, and then carried on that way throughout the day.\u00a0 Luckily the weather forecast had been spot-on, so we pretty much had planned on a down day.\u00a0 Poor Jack!\u00a0 This would have been his first real down day since the weekend before<\/em> the whole road trip started, but instead he drove the 3.5 hours to the Minneapolis airport and then flew back to Denver.\u00a0 Colm decided to stay at the cabin and get some work done, while Tim and Sonja made the rainy drive up to Ashland, Wisconsin, to have a look at Lake Superior.\u00a0
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Lake Superior, the largest freshwater lake in the world (by surface area).
Side note: Sonja has the distinction of having swum in Lake Superior every month of the year. (Well, \u201cswim\u201d is a strong word for some of the months, but she was at least completely submerged beneath the water for at least a second or so before screaming back to dry ground during the chillier months).<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Colm ran a trajectory prediction for the next AirCore, so after the Lake Superior tour, we all went in search of a launch location for Thursday.\u00a0 Ironically, it\u2019s not that hard to decide on a spot.\u00a0 There are so many trees and lakes that we\u2019re limited to the few other places.\u00a0 Thanks to Google satellite views, we can see where those are in advance.\u00a0 So with some pre-Googling and a bit of touring around, we came across a nice farmer in Peeksville who offered up his yard. \u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Thursday dawned looking\u2026. ummm\u2026.. cloudy again.\u00a0 But the forecast said it was supposed to clear up, though maybe a little later.\u00a0 So Tim prepped the AirCores and Colm contacted the FAA to let them know we were delaying our launch by an hour.\u00a0 We stopped by the Peeksville farm to let them know we were going to wait an hour for the clouds to clear a bit.\u00a0 The farmer\u2019s wife laughed and basically said, \u201cYa, good luck with that,\u201d in a very polite Midwestern sort of way.\u00a0 An hour later and then on into the afternoon, we realized that instead of the the weather models, we really should have consulted with her<\/em>.\u00a0 The clouds persisted.\u00a0 All day.\u00a0 Sigh.\u00a0 We could<\/em> still have launched but since the TCCON instrument requires clear skies, we wouldn\u2019t get a comparison and the possibilities of losing an AirCore up here are higher than what we\u2019re used do, so we canceled.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

After whiling away the morning waiting for the clouds to clear, we hit the road to find Friday\u2019s launch spot, which ends up being a family’s yard with a huge, beautifully mowed lawn pretty far northwest of the tower.\u00a0 [Being opportunists we also stopped to take a quick hike around the Doughboy Trail at Copper Falls State Park (highly recommended!).]\u00a0 Friday is a priority because the OCO-2 satellite is scheduled to be flying over and making downward measurements, while the TCCON and the EM-27s were making upward measurements and the AirCore is flying through<\/em> the atmospheric column.<\/p>\n\n\n\n