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Tomorrow the TV crew leaves and so it was a day of catching a few shots that hadn't been covered yet. They taped the daily planning meeting early this morning. With up to a hundred people, three aircraft, an oceangoing vessel, and people releasing weather balloons at five stations hundreds of miles apart planning gets to be a major process. But without the planning, coordination would be impossible. I don't think that anyone really enjoys planning meetings but the crew here has remained pretty upbeat about the whole process.

Today's flights were planned around the satellite overpass at 5:44 PM. It turned out to be a very sunny day here at Kwaj. In fact, the DC-8 used part of their flying hours to do runs over cloud-free water. In doing so, they are using the cloud-free ocean as a "standard". The ocean emits very few microwaves and so collecting data over the cloud-free ocean is like looking at a surface that we can assume should give a zero value. It is more complicated than that, but is still used as a known, low constant. The DC-8 has an instrument that works just like the TRMM Microwave Imager. By timing the cloud-free data collection with the satellite overpass, both the DC-8 instrument and the TRMM Microwave Imager are looking at the same known, low constant and it provides a very good means to compare the two instruments and the data they collect. This is one of the ways to calibrate a satellite with airborne instruments.

The DC-8 is NASA's 4-engine jet aircraft that is used as a platform for many scientific studies. This picture was taken from the top of "Mt. Olympus", the 12-ft high, tallest point on Kwajalein. I'll get a better picture of the whole plane for you tomorrow.

Here is the front of the airplane. The red streamers are protecting instruments (both scientific and for just flying the airplane). The gold-colored piece on the top is yet another instrument that is sampling water droplets and ice crystals in the clouds.

The inside of the DC-8 is a big open space that can be configured in many different ways. Generally, the scientific equipment gets mounted in a rack that is bolted to the floor. Then a half row of seats is mounted next to the equipment rack so that people can sit in the seats and run their equipment. It feels wide open in comparison to your normal jetliner, but it feels claustrophobic in comparison to your normal science lab!

Here the video crew is copying over some of the footage from the forward-pointing video camera from yesterday's flight when Erica was riding on the DC-8. We also picked up a VHS copy with the sound track of the entire flight. All the communications over the intercom on the DC-8 are recorded. The crew has emphasized that the sound track is unedited! It doesn't take too much imagination to conjure up situations where maybe that sound track isn't G-rated. Sound editing can do wonderful things...

All the time while flying, the DC-8 is recording regular video from cameras facing forward, left, right and "nadir" (that's straight down). That provides the possibility of going back to those tapes to see what us humans would see whenever data was being collected. For instance, maybe the radar will detect a strong cell in a cloud off to the left. The video tape can then be played back to see what that interesting radar cloud looked like to us non-radar humans. It is a pretty simple means of keeping a very detailed record of the flight.

This afternoon, Rich rode on the Convair for a long afternoon flight and came back pretty excited about some of the footage he had shot. During parts of his flight he said there were "rainbows everywhere". In the next couple days I'll give you some details and pictures on the Convair aircraft and talk a bit about why we have three different aircraft here for the KWAJEX experiment.

Alan Nelson