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Today was a down day for the aircraft. Several repairs were needed and there aren't very many clouds around. The aircraft are all gearing up for tomorrow at 8:44 AM local time when the TRMM satellite will be almost directly overhead. Only a "severely clear" day will keep them grounded tomorrow because they want to collect as much data as they can directly under the satellite so that the satellite data and aircraft data can be directly compared to each other. It is an important opportunity tomorrow. We just need some clouds. With relatively little activity going on at Kwajalein, the TV crew and I took the opportunity to go the island of Roi-Namur (usually shortened to just "Roi", the northernmost island in the Kwajalein atoll. We hopped on the first flight at 7 AM on the plane that ferries workers back and forth from Kwaj to Roi. These planes are equipped with air conditioning and that leads to an interesting phenomenon inside the plane.

The air is sufficiently humid that the cold air coming out of the air conditioning vents creates fog inside the plane. The forces at work here are the same ones working in clouds. One of the properties of warm air is that it can hold more water vapor than cool air. What this picture shows is what happens when moist air gets cooled. The cool air can't hold as much water vapor as it could when it was warm air. Some of the water vapor in the cooled air must turn into a liquid and form water droplets. We see the droplets as fog in the airplane. If you've been reading my journal all along, you may remember seeing the same droplet-forming process above the airplane wing while landing in Honolulu (it is in the August 13 journal).

The Kwajalein Atoll was an important piece of real estate during World War II. The island of Kwajalein was the first Pacific island taken by U.S. forces, in February of 1944. Virtually all of the evidence of WWII has been covered up by new construction on the island of Kwajalein. On the island of Roi, however, many examples of WWII history are preserved. Here are the remnants of a bombed-out, concrete building. The airport terminal is named after a soldier who posthumously received the Congressional Medal of Honor for his actions in the capture of the island of Roi from the Japanese.

Just around the corner from the airport terminal was a sandy beach that was well populated with grasshoppers and hermit crabs. This fellow gave a rare opportunity to see almost his whole body because he had picked up a shell with a hole in it! Here you see the front of the crab and the hole can barely be seen over the top of his body.

We taped the rain-gauge network on Roi and taped the release of a radiosonde from the Roi site. It was a good lesson for me because I will soon be responsible for releasing radiosondes. Because there were no aircraft flying, there were radiosonde releases only at 11 AM and 11 PM. More sondes are released on days when TRMM aircraft are flying. Needless to say we taped the one during the morning. During my two weeks of radiosonde releases, we will be releasing 6 a day, every day. More about that when I am doing it!

The flight back to Kwaj gave us another great look at the long chain of islands that make up this atoll. I keep wanting to open up the windows of the plane so I'm not photographing through two panes of plexiglass. The crew wouldn't appreciate that. What is hardest to capture on film or tape or digital camera through the windows are the amazing shades of blue water. I generally associate natural bodies of water with green--even really clean lakes. This water is BLUE!!! Even more blue than what I saw in Hawaii. It continues to delight me every time I see it. Tomorrow I hope to do a bit of snorkeling to see how it looks underwater.

Alan Nelson