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All we needed was clouds....but we only got little ones. There was hardly even a little one in the sky when the satellite went overhead at 8:44 AM today. Too bad. There were lots of people up at 5 AM getting ready for 7 AM takeoffs. The planes want to be in the air and all set up for collecting data an hour before an overpass so that they will have data collected both before and after the overpass. But today there weren't any clouds to be measured.

Not only were there no clouds for the overpass, but the system which was coming at us and gaining momentum all day yesterday just fizzled in a period of three hours overnight. So on a day when we were hoping to have two airplane flights, we end up having none. Such is the nature of such field experiments that rely on the weather. A lot of the time spent at a field experiment is spent in planning and coordinating activities so that people's data support each other. Weather is difficult to predict, period. In the middle of the ocean, it is even more difficult because there are fewer driving forces (mountains, Canadian air masses, cold fronts, warm fronts...) We are in the middle of a million+ square miles of pretty consistent ocean water. Weather systems in the ocean are often short-lived, like that system yesterday that disappeared overnight. Makes things frustrating on a day like today.

The poor Convair crew must be pulling their hair out. Their right engine broke a small obscure part before I arrived. They had not been able to get a replacement part delivered. The highest priority for shipping things into these islands are mail and food. Unfortunately engine parts take a third seat. Eventually, a part was hand carried to Honolulu and delivered to someone who was booked to come to Kwajalein. On Saturday the part arrived and the right engine was fixed. During a test flight of the right engine, the left engine developed problems. Aaargh!! We are still hoping to get one TV camera on the DC-8 and the other camera on the Convair during simultaneous flights. Time is running out for the TV crew, though. I sure hope we have clouds and functioning aircraft tomorrow.

I helped the TV crew this morning conduct an interview with Sandra Yuter of the University of Washington. Sandra has been living seemingly non-stop in the "Operations Center" ever since KWAJEX began in mid-July. We used the DC-8 as a backdrop as she talked about why we are using three different airplanes in the same study. She describes the approach as an "airplane sandwich" with the lowest airplane sampling the clouds where they clouds are made up of water and also sampling with several upward looking sensors. The highest plane is sampling where the cloud particles are made up of tiny ice particles. The middle plane is obviously between the other two, but what is halfway between water and ice?!? The answer is big snowflakes. For those of you who live in places where you get snow, you may remember rare snowfalls with really big flakes that always seem to fall slowly and straight down. That's the stuff in the middle of clouds. As you get higher, the ice particles get smaller.

Sometimes, the aircraft are also spiraling down through the clouds slowly. Trying to mimic the falling rain/ice particles as they fall through a cloud. The spirals will hopefully give us some insight into how the particles mature in a cloud.

The cancelled flights gave me a chance to get over to the turtle pond. It is an artificial tank where there are a few salt water fish and five sea turtles.

Ever wondered what a turtle looks like, eye-to-eye?

Alan Nelson