The journey has begun with the alarm going off at 3:50 AM. The first leg is a short flight from Washington National to Newark, New Jersey. I believe it is my first flight on a 737-300. There are only 55 people on board and so the performance of the airplane is impressive: announcement of 10,000 feet six minutes into the flight and level at 19,000 feet three minutes later. We cruise for only seven minutes and then begin our descent. Airliners are so much quieter now than they were just 7 or 8 years ago. My ears pop only once on the whole flight.

The flight gives me a chance to ponder what is ahead. As we see sunrise, I wonder if I will get tired of all the sunshine in the middle of the Pacific. I think ahead to September 1 when the sun will be directly overhead at Kwajalein. I hope I can find a flag pole in the sun at noon without a shadow! The morning is a scuzzy gray day. The beautiful clear air above a few thousand feet makes me ponder, as always, what effect we are having on our atmosphere.

The two-person TV crew from Goddard Space Flight Center is also on this flight. They have a lot of equipment and batteries so their bags are big and heavy. They do not want to pass the video cameras through the security scanners. Makes the security check much more cumbersome. I am pleased to see that they care as much as they do about their equipment. That indicates a high degree of professionalism. I look forward to working with them in the week ahead. It will be fun to learn a bit more about TV production.

The 10-hour flight from Newark to Honolulu is LOOoonnnggg!! After breakfast and TWO movies, we were still over land and not even half way there. Our last peek at land was near the southern tip of the Baja peninsula. Yes, a straight line from Newark to Honolulu does go that far south!

Though this picture on our final approach into Honolulu is through a scratchy window and isn't great, it illustrates several things. It shows why the KWAJEX experiment was NOT done in Hawaii. The Hawaiian islands are big enough and tall enough that they influence their own weather. Note that the only clouds in the picture are the ones over the land. That is pretty typical. Trade winds force the moist ocean air up and over the islands' mass. But in the atmosphere, higher means less pressure and colder (usually--we may talk about that more over the next few weeks...). Cooler makes the water in the air condense and form the water droplets that we see as clouds (we'll talk a lot about that over the next few weeks...because the energy transfer during cloud formation is what KWAJEX and TRMM are all about). KWAJEX is designed to study the processes involved in ocean rains. The Hawaiian islands are big enough that they change the processes from ocean processes to land processes.

The tiny white cloud around the wing was formed by essentially the same process but this time the lower pressure and temperature were caused by the aerodynamics of the wing. An airplane wing generates lift by creating lower pressure on top of the wing. Look into the Bernoulli principle and you will learn that the low pressure is created by making the air expand a bit on top of the wing. That expansion makes the air cool just a tiny bit. The tiny bit of cooling was enough to make some water vapor condense and form water droplets--which we see as a tiny cloud around the wing. When I took the picture we were just barely below the bottom of the cloud layer so we were in a part of the atmosphere where conditions were ripe for cloud formation. Wings don't usually form clouds around them, but it is not uncommon. This picture is one of the larger wing clouds I've ever seen.

Partly due to airline scheduling and partially because of a decades-long desire to see islands other than Oahu (the island with Pearl Harbor and Honolulu) I have added a couple vacation days in Hawaii before I go on to Kwajalein. So after a 10-hour flight I...got on a plane again for a short (20-minute) hop to the island of Kauai. The beaches, waves, blue water and lush green mountains combine to make a gorgeous island. This picture is of Wailua Falls which is on the Wailua river near the city of Lihue on Kauai. These rivers are all rain fed and it is a pretty small piece of land that is collecting the rain. A subtle indication that there is a lot of rainfall around here. Of course the lush green vegetation is a pretty clear indication, too. In most places, these falls would be a grand tourist destination. But here, I get to look at them by myself with no one else around. It is easy to imagine what it was like for the first humans who discovered these falls. It is a marvelous experience.

Four miles down the road I stop at the Wal-Mart to pick up food and drinks for hiking tomorrow!!

Alan Nelson