The tour took a while, because I know a number of the researchers. In particular, when I came out on the fantail, the NASA television crew was wrapping up an interview with Dr. Jeff Nystuen. Jeff is working on measuring rainfall by processing the sounds it makes when it hits the surface of the water. The concept is still under development, but I'm excited because we're hard-pressed to come up with any reliable rainfall information in oceanic areas. [Gauges don't work on ships because of sea spray and wind flow around the ship's superstructure.] It turns out that rainfall on the ocean's surface is fairly loud, at least at specific pitches, compared to most other sounds that an underwater microphone will pick up. Then Jeff told me that he had recently learned that snowfall is "loud" at very high pitches underwater. The mechanism isn't entirely clear, but it likely involves the release of microscopic air bubbles as the snow melts. Our understanding of snowfall amounts over high-latitude oceans is very minimal, so any technology that has a chance of giving us a quantitative picture is worth investigation.

While I was touring the ship's bridge we got a good squall moving through. Fortunately, we had called for two aircraft missions. The morning flight only found minimal showers, but an MCS (mesoscale convective system) started showing up on the radar in the late morning. The planes took off before the storm hit and got lots of great data. One interesting feature, which we've seen before, is that the spatial organization of the convection shifted with time, going from lines oriented north-south to lines oriented more southwest-northeast. As always, the strongest cells at any given instant only lasted a half hour or so before dying and being replaced by other cells in different locations. One piece of good news was that the Convair was repaired and participated in this afternoon's flight.