Warm and breezy today. The winds appear to have been a little less than forecast last night, although there were some strong gusts. A strong Sundowner is also forecast tonight, with gusts up to 70 mph on the eastern ridges. The first IOP was carried out last night and a second shorter IOP started late this afternoon.
All systems are operating normally. The soundings went well last night, although the students reported having to restart the systems a couple of times to get good communications with the ground check units. Also the surface observations are not showing up on the MW41 sounding screen. It does appear they are being ingested, just not displayed for some reason. Therefore for the sounding log spreadsheet we are using surface data from the dsm dashboard as viewed by a web browser on the dm computers browsing directly to the dsm ip addresses.
There were waves reported by the Twin Otter and waves (and perhaps rotors) can be seen in the ISS measurements, particularly the Modular Profiler and Wind Lidar at ISS1. A good example is in the 4-hour Modular Profiler plot from 5 - 9 UTC where the vertical velocity shows an apparent downward standing wave around 2km and more rapid up and down motions with periods of about 5 minutes up to about 1 km. The wind lidar also saw complicated wind structure as can be seen in the PPI scan at 0837 UTC.
The second IOP started with soundings at 4pm (23 UTC) at ISS2 Rancho Alegre and the university sites in Santa Barbara. We carried out the 4pm sounding, students will do the following soundings finishing with a 1 am sounding. The ISS2 sounding appeared to hit a strong downdraft soon after launch. At about 6 minutes into the flight the radiosonde pressure suddenly rose about 15 hPa, suggesting a drop of around 150 meters. Afterwards the balloon continued ascending however the MW41 registered the drop as the balloon bursting. This means that the skew-t and profile plots are truncated at just 780 hPa when in fact the ballon rose to a record 28 hPa before actually bursting. The ascending data is still in the MWX archive file but will have to be accessed in post-project processing.
The MW41 display for the 23 UTC sounding. Not the oscillating blue line which is the pressure trace and indicates that the radiosonde dropped about 6 minutes into the flight.