{"id":107,"date":"2016-10-19T06:17:52","date_gmt":"2016-10-19T06:17:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/ciresblogs.colorado.edu\/alaska-unmanned-3\/?p=107"},"modified":"2016-10-19T06:19:41","modified_gmt":"2016-10-19T06:19:41","slug":"more-good-weather","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ciresblogs.colorado.edu\/alaska-unmanned-3\/2016\/10\/19\/more-good-weather\/","title":{"rendered":"More good weather\u2026"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"The

The newly forming sea ice offshore. We spent quite a bit of time sampling this today, and tonight’s cold temperatures should provide more opportunities to sample it tomorrow!<\/p><\/div>\n

 <\/p>\n

It was another fantastic day of flights at Oliktok Point!\u00a0 With the weather continuing to provide opportunities for flight, Doug and I took full advantage and completed another six flights.\u00a0 While six flights might not seem like a lot, several of these were starting to push 45 minutes in length.\u00a0 In addition, the rapidly declining amount of daylight only provides us with so much time during the day to get our flights in \u2013 this morning we were not able to fly until around 9:30 am, and we had to put the last flight down around 6:20 pm.\u00a0 When you combine all of this with the cold weather, it makes for a pretty full and active day — in total, we’ve completed 13 flights over the last two days, totaling over 330 minutes of flight time!<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"Profiles

Profiles of temperature measured by the DataHawks over the last two days. Today was a lot colder than yesterday!<\/p><\/div>\n

 <\/p>\n

I started the day in the dark\u00a0on the phone\u00a0with colleagues back in the lower 48 to make some repairs on one of the instruments we brought up to fly on the tethered balloon.\u00a0 While it\u2019s not much fun waiting for the sun to come up, it is an excellent opportunity to take care of some housekeeping items such as this.\u00a0 After the adjustments, the instrument was once again working well and ready for deployment into the Arctic sky\u00a0tomorrow!\u00a0 We started the day\u2019s flights with some profiles up toward the low cloud cover that was overhead.\u00a0 In addition, we completed some low-altitude flights to get some samples of the spatial variability near the surface over a variety of surface types, including tundra, frozen ponds and the river.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

After this, we switched to a second DataHawk, which was equipped with a couple of cameras so that we could capture both video and photographs of the Oliktok environment.\u00a0 We got some great shots of the day\u2019s weather from the air, including a nice photograph of the AMF-3 and the ARM tethered balloon.\u00a0 From here, we did some more profiling and then headed back to the beach for our next \u201cflux\u201d flight over the newly forming sea ice.\u00a0 Admittedly, this flight takes a lot out of Doug and myself.\u00a0 Buzzing over the ocean at 20 meters altitude doesn\u2019t leave much room for error, so both the pilot and operator are very, very focused on every little thing that the plane is doing during that time.\u00a0 I\u2019m happy to report that for the second straight day, and third time this trip, we successfully completed this flight — the airplanes have been flying very well! \u00a0Together, these flux flights will provide critical information on how the transfer of energy from the surface to the atmosphere is evolving as the ice gets thicker.\u00a0 Hopefully conditions will give us\u00a0a few additional\u00a0days.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"A

A DataHawk’s view of the sea ice and tundra today at Oliktok Point. \u00a0The white thing on the right of the image is the nose of the aircraft.<\/p><\/div>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"The

The AMF-3 and ARM tethered balloon, as seen by a DataHawk.<\/p><\/div>\n

 <\/p>\n

At the end of the day, we completed some more profiling, including an extended period of profiling between 10 and 50 meters altitude.\u00a0 This was a bit of an \u201con the fly\u201d decision made to sample a developing stable \u201cinversion\u201d layer.\u00a0 With the clouds thinning out, and the sun going down, the lower atmosphere began to cool very rapidly.\u00a0\u00a0 This is one of the great things about these platforms \u2013 you can target specific areas of interest as they develop!<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"A

A developing surface inversion layer, as seen by the DataHawk as the sun went down today.<\/p><\/div>\n

 <\/p>\n

Tomorrow is certain to be another busy day for both the DataHawk and the tethered balloon crews.\u00a0 Time to get some rest!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

  It was another fantastic day of flights at Oliktok Point!\u00a0 With the weather continuing to provide opportunities for flight, Doug and I took full advantage and completed another six flights.\u00a0 While six flights might not seem like a lot, several of these were starting to push 45 minutes in length.\u00a0 In addition, the rapidly… Read More<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":38,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-107","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-05-19 13:28:05","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category"},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ciresblogs.colorado.edu\/alaska-unmanned-3\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/107","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ciresblogs.colorado.edu\/alaska-unmanned-3\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ciresblogs.colorado.edu\/alaska-unmanned-3\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ciresblogs.colorado.edu\/alaska-unmanned-3\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/38"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ciresblogs.colorado.edu\/alaska-unmanned-3\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=107"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/ciresblogs.colorado.edu\/alaska-unmanned-3\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/107\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":114,"href":"https:\/\/ciresblogs.colorado.edu\/alaska-unmanned-3\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/107\/revisions\/114"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ciresblogs.colorado.edu\/alaska-unmanned-3\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=107"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ciresblogs.colorado.edu\/alaska-unmanned-3\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=107"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ciresblogs.colorado.edu\/alaska-unmanned-3\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=107"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}