The first IOP began this afternoon. It was a sunny mostly clear cool day, with a little haze. Gannet reported significant aerosol concentrations and that could be seen in the somewhat increased range of the wind lidar (although it was still modest at around 2-3 km compared to summer measurements). No report yesterday as we were very busy preparing for the IOP today, including setting up lidar scans, profiler modes, training students, helping Steve with the telescoping towers, etc.
The IOP today was called because there is a possibility of a little fog tonight, perhaps being amplified by possible precip. It is being called an "Ephemeral Fog" IOP which means soundings at 1420, 1615, 2215, 0015, 0215, 0415, 0715, and 1015 local times. NCAR launched the first two soundings, and the University are launching the subsequent soundings (although I also joined the 2215 sounding to provide a little more training). There were a couple of issues with the first two soundings, the first being a power failure due to a GFI tripping apparently when a breaker was swapped out for one of the university trailers (this also caused a brief outage in the CL61 and DSM data), and the second when the ground check unit was unresponsive - cured by rebooting the computer. There is still a network issue connecting to the sounding computer so data is not yet being transferred to the DM.
At the wind lidar, adjusted the scans and attempted a backscatter calibration, although it's not clear that the conditions were appropriate so will try again tomorrow. The modular wind profiler continues to work well. In winds mode at 2030UT it was drawing 3.13A on the 50V supply and 1.76A on the 31V supply and consistently getting winds to 1 km and sometimes up to 3km. In RASS mode the draw was 3.49A and 1.92 A on the 50 and 31 V supplies respectively, and RASS returns were often up to 1.5 km.
First nighttime sounding of the campaign