The satellite phone at the TRMM site on Woja Island was half-fixed today. I could call in, but they couldn't call out. So, I once again called the service provider in New York City and tried to move toward a solution. Of course, since it's the weekend nothing will be done until Monday. At least I could call them and have a decent, somewhat private connection instead of taking my chances with the RF radio. For the first time in twelve days I could go back to the routine of riding to the Operations Center in the pre-dawn darkness to log in faxed data and make phone calls before the forecast meeting.

Fortuitously, it was lovely this morning. The past-full moon was hanging high in the western sky, casting a silvery glow on several cumulus congestus clouds (intermediate-sized billowy clouds). An hour later we were these lovely clouds were overhead and it was raining like crazy. That's the price we pay for choosing to come to a place that is sometimes directly under the ITCZ, which we were today. It was overcast a good bit of the day, with occasional heavy showers, and drizzly stuff more often. It seemed that the children at the chapel service were more restless today, although that might have been a by-product of starting school this week.

The aircraft scientists were gloriously happy. The flight was scheduled for 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. and they had good targets to sample for the whole time. Some of the instruments have been patched, and Brad Ferrier, my replacement, is hand-carrying some spare parts when he comes on Wednesday.

In the evening I helped send off the final crew to Lae Island. This time there were three people because we will be launching six soundings a day for the next two weeks instead of the current two-to-five. This "budget period" will provide soundings that are regularly and closely spaced in time so that changes with time are easy to interpret. The schedule will be pretty challenging with the limited staffing we've got, but we expect it to work out because it will only last for two weeks. One of the other concerns about the budget period is the number of radiosondes required. We have ordered a certain quantity assuming a 10% failure rate, but every once in a while a whole carton of them turns out to be substandard. That just happened at the Roi and Kwaj sites, and we had to throw away four or five at each site on the same day. If that happened very often we wouldn't make it through the whole two weeks!

George Huffman