![\"\"](\"http:\/\/ciresblogs.colorado.edu\/taking-flight\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/68\/2018\/07\/2037-300x225.jpg\")
The University of Kentucky prepares for their next flight.<\/p><\/div>\n
The first site I visited was a University of Kentucky site, on the edge of a farm field.\u00a0 One of the major challenges associated with the development and execution of this campaign has been to secure permission to fly from someone\u2019s land.\u00a0 While roadways are public and sometimes some of the land around them is as well, in an ideal situation teams have had a chance to speak directly with the owners of the land around their operation.\u00a0 In this case, Kentucky had asked the landowners whether they could set up their tents and aircraft operations on an unused farm site and they said that it would be no problem.\u00a0 In general, people in the San Luis Valley have been friendly and welcoming and that alone makes the operation much easier.<\/p>\n
From this site, I went on to the east toward the Great Sand Dunes National Park, to a site where Oklahoma State was setting up.\u00a0 As an aside, the National Park Service keeps very strict control over the use of drones over their land.\u00a0 Of our group, Nebraska worked with NPS to secure permission to operate from the Great Sand Dunes Park, but Oklahoma State was able to set up on the boundary.\u00a0 It is amazing to me how much of a transition there is between different parts of the valley.\u00a0 While the area around Leach Airport is surrounded by agricultural fields, the eastern slopes along the Sangre de Cristo mountains are dry and desert like.\u00a0 In fact, I saw a large snake (I believe a rattle snake), which had unfortunately been run-over along the road on the way there.<\/p>\n
![\"\"](\"http:\/\/ciresblogs.colorado.edu\/taking-flight\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/68\/2018\/07\/2035-300x225.jpg\")
Oklahoma State sets up their equipment in the dry shrub land of the eastern San Luis Valley.<\/p><\/div>\n
<\/p>\n
![\"\"](\"http:\/\/ciresblogs.colorado.edu\/taking-flight\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/68\/2018\/07\/2050-300x225.jpg\")
The University of Oklahoma CLAMPS trailer, filled with instrumentation, watches the skies over Moffat.<\/p><\/div>\n
After this, I visited another Kentucky site, a site covered by the Finnish Meteorological Institute and Kansas State, and finally a site at the Moffat School where the University of Oklahoma has both aircraft and ground based instrumentation.\u00a0 Again along the lines of community support, Moffat was kind enough to allow us to not only base at their school, but also tap into power and internet!<\/p>\n
After lunch (and pie!), I did a bit of site scouting for one of the other missions and headed west toward Saguache.\u00a0 At this point there was quite a bit of convective storm activity (exactly what we were working to study!), including some lightning.\u00a0 Because of this, the OU team that was operating at Saguache Airport had already packed up (wisely) and it was time to head back to Alamosa for today\u2019s weather briefing.<\/p>\n
All in all, over 100 research flights and seven radiosonde launches in a single day!\u00a0 In addition to the ground based measurements and model simulations, today\u2019s measurements represent a fantastic start to the LAPSE-RATE campaign!<\/p>\n
![\"\"](\"http:\/\/ciresblogs.colorado.edu\/taking-flight\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/68\/2018\/07\/2041-300x225.jpg\")
Kansas State and the Finnish Meteorological Institute prepare for operation of their three aircraft.<\/p><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
This is Gijs de Boer again providing a perspective on Sunday\u2019s flights.\u00a0 This morning I found myself in a strange position.\u00a0 Despite having put a ton of time and work into flight week, I had no place to formally be.\u00a0 Unlike in previous campaigns, where I\u2019ve been directly involved with the actual aircraft operations, this… Read More<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":149,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-62","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-05-20 19:46:51","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category"},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ciresblogs.colorado.edu\/taking-flight\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/62","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ciresblogs.colorado.edu\/taking-flight\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ciresblogs.colorado.edu\/taking-flight\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ciresblogs.colorado.edu\/taking-flight\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/149"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ciresblogs.colorado.edu\/taking-flight\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=62"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/ciresblogs.colorado.edu\/taking-flight\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/62\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":70,"href":"https:\/\/ciresblogs.colorado.edu\/taking-flight\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/62\/revisions\/70"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ciresblogs.colorado.edu\/taking-flight\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=62"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ciresblogs.colorado.edu\/taking-flight\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=62"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ciresblogs.colorado.edu\/taking-flight\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=62"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}