Today's forecast and flight decision weren't merely wrong, they had a train wreck. The previous day's forecast showed a reasonable chance that a surface feature would have upper level support and give us early morning rain. Accordingly, we put out a notice for a possible 7 a.m. (sunrise) flight. That required the project leadership to stumble into the forecast office at 4:30 a.m. for a weather briefing on which to base the go/no-go decision. Despite apparently favorable conditions, the previous evening's convection had died out and both the radar and satellite images showed no interesting weather. The forecaster was sufficiently unsure of additional development that we scrubbed the flights for the day.

As you might guess from my opening line, scattered rain developed by 7 a.m., and by 9 a.m. we had an impressive band of showers to our south. It kept going all day over the entire area. Even more than Sunday it was cloudy and dark. At lunch I took a bike to the air terminal for shipment to our new team member at Roi, so I had to walk the half mile back to Building 1009. No problem, once I got my flip-flops, bathing suit, raincoat, and umbrella.

The Convair made a test flight to try out some repaired instruments in the afternoon, and ended up capturing some good data. In fact, it turned out that some of the storms were a little more exciting than the pilot cared for.

One of the good things about forecasting busts (that's a technical term for "large error") is that they make you look for clues that you missed. In this case, there were two indicators that might have been useful. First, the satellite channel that is related to water vapor content in the upper troposphere (around the tops of the tallest clouds) showed upper level forcing. That is, the high-level clouds to our north were moving northeast, while those to our south were moving south. This "difluence" (flowing apart) is favorable for general upward motion and convection. Second, even though there weren't any deep rainstorms at 4:30 a.m., a line of medium-sized clouds some two hundred miles long had started to appear just to our east. It's possible that these two facts together could have helped us make a better forecast. We're theorizing that all the convective energy in the area had been used up for a while, and it took several hours of forcing at the various levels to get back to significant activity.

One good piece of news was that the radiosonde tracking/receiving system at Meck is ready for use. The system is really old, so spare parts are a big problem. As I understand it, the shipment of spares we got was more or less an unsorted collection of pieces that had to be evaluated once they got here. The AeroMet technicians spent a couple of days replacing circuit boards and tweaking circuits to get the best performance. There are still some issues around the edges, but overall, the four launches they've done have been satisfactory. Starting tomorrow my crew will attempt routine launches around the clock. It's important to get Meck going in general, but particularly now, because we did start the budget period today, and Meck is one of the sites participating.

George Huffman