Tag: cloud

Posted on

Debra Brice, November 20, 2003

NOAA Teacher at Sea
Debra Brice
Onboard R/V Roger Revelle
November 11-25, 2003

Mission: Ocean Observation
Geographical Area: Chilean Coast
Date: November 20, 2003

Data from the Bridge
1.  201600Z Nov 03
2.  Position: LAT: 19-46.2’S, LONG: 085-32.5’W
3.  Course: On Station
4.  Speed: 0 Kts
5.  Distance: 0 NM
6.  Steaming Time:  0H 00M
7.  Station Time:  24H 00M
8.  Fuel: 1477 GAL
9.  Sky: OvrCst
10. Wind: 140-T, 12 Kts
11. Sea: 140-T, 2-3 Ft
12. Swell: 160-T, 3-5 Ft
13. Barometer: 1018.1 mb
14. Temperature: Air: 21.3 C, Sea 19.7 C
15. Equipment Status: NORMAL
16. Comments: On station in vicinity of WHOI buoy.

Science and Technology Log

We are still in the vicinity of the WHOI buoy and will stay here for 24 hours to check and compare the sensors on the Stratus 4, Stratus 3 and the ship.  We will then leave for the area of deployment of the Tsunami buoy.  We will do 2 CTD casts before leaving.

During our cruise we have been deploying radiosonde weather balloons and the ETL group has been collecting cloud data. I am going to give a brief description of the ETL Cloud Radar and Radiometer Package that they brought with them and are using to collect their data. Clouds play vitally important roles in climate and and water resources by virtue of their ability to transform radiant energy and water phase in the atmosphere.  NOAA?ETL uses microwave and infrared radiometers for ground based cloud observations. ETL designed and is using the Millimeter-wave Cloud Radar (MMCR).  These radars are intended to operate in remote locations and for field experiments.  The radar is joined in a sea container by a dual- channel microwave radiometer (MWR) and a narrow-band infrared radiometer IRR).  Simultaneous data from these instruments provide the input for retrieving microphysical features of the overlying tropospheric clouds.

Instrument Package Characteristics:

Cloud Radar: Ultra high sensitivity, doppler
Primary uses: vertical profiles of clouds. drizzle, snow and very light rain

Microwave Radiometer:
Primary uses: Monitoring vertical water vapor path and liquid water path.

IR Radiometer:
Primary uses: Sensing presense of cloud overhead, estimating base temp. of optically thick clouds.

Collectively, the instruments are called the MMCR Package. Each observes the senith and does not scan, hence, the system is a vertical profiler. This is the second time that ETL has come out with the Stratus Project and it is hoped that through additional funding it will become a permanent partner in this long term study.  ETL is doing these measurements and calibrations not only to verify some of the meteorological data collected from the sensors on the WHOI buoy, but also to do profiles on the cloud structures of the stratus clouds in this area to campare the data to the mathematical models.  They are also using the data to compare and calibrate the mean and the flux calculations used in the Stratus project.  ETL came out during the second year of the Stratus project to do a similar survey.

Personal Log

The WHOI science group are doing their calibrations and measurements all day and the ETL group continues to collect data.  PMEL/NOAA is waiting to deply their buoy at the next site.  The weather is beautiful, warm, sunny, some clouds (stratus!) I am doing a lot of reading and talking with different science groups and crew members to prepare for interviews.  Tonight we will be interviewing the ETL group about their cloud studies. E-mail will be sporadic from now on as we will be on heading that will not allow us satellite communication.  We will turn for 30 minutes once a day to send out and receive e-mail. Tomorrow and the day after will be travel days to the Tsunami deployment site.We still have a couple of boobies following us….obviously hopeful that we will toss out another floating cafeteria for them.  Learning a great deal about how these large oceanographic research vessels run.  They are all owned by different facilities but they are assigned by one entity that schedules all of the science cruises for best efficiency of the vessels.  The scheduling entity is UNOLS.  So a Scripps scientist could be schedules to go out on a Woods Hole vessel one year and a NOAA vessel the next based on the science needs for size, equipment and location.  This means that for example the REVELLE came into its home port of San Diego in September and picked up a science group; did their leg, dropped them off in Manta, Equador, where we met them and loaded equipment for our project and left.  We will arrive in Arica, disembark, ship the equipment back to its various labs and the new science party will board and leave for their project.  This will continue until sometime in April until REVELLE briefly returns to San Diego, where it will pick up another science party and go out again.  It may only come into San Diego two or three times a year.  These ships are almost constantly out working and the crews fly in and out of various ports to meet the ships and change crews.

Hasta Luego

 

Posted on

Jane Temoshok, October 16, 2001

NOAA Teacher at Sea
Jane Temoshok
Onboard NOAA Ship Ronald H. Brown
October 2 – 24, 2001

Mission: Eastern Pacific Investigation of Climate Processes
Geographical Area: Eastern Pacific
Date: October 16, 2001

Latitude: 20º S
Longitude: 85º W
Air Temp. 19.8º C
Sea Temp. 18.6º C
Sea Wave: 1 – 2 ft.
Swell Wave: 3 – 4 ft.
Visibility: 8 – 10 miles
Cloud cover: 6/8

Science Log

LIDAR – Brandi McCarty & Scott Sandberg, ETL

Light and sound. LIDAR and RADAR. Both of these are used by scientists to observe the world. RADAR uses radio waves and LIDAR uses light waves. In this case, Brandi and Scott, from ETL in Colorado, use light waves, rather than sound waves, to observe clouds. They have a fully equipped van that was placed on the deck of the BROWN back in Seattle. Their major interest is observing the water vapor and wind velocity below and within stratus clouds. The instruments measure from 300 meters off the surface of the ocean up to about 4000 meters in the atmosphere.

Clouds have different functions. Depending upon how far they are away from the surface and what they are made from, clouds can act as a barrier to heat energy from the sun or as a blanket to keep heat trapped below.

Think of being in a hot desert. You would probably put on a light cloth to keep the burning sun out and keep you cooler. When the temperature drops though, you would want that cloth to keep your body heat in and not let it escape. Clouds are a lot like that. Mother Nature does a good job of keeping the planet at the right temperature. Now scientists want to figure out how she does it.

Brandi and Scott are working to collect lots of data that other scientists will use to make weather predictions. You can imagine that all the data that the ETL groups pull together from this trip could provide atmospheric scientists with lots of information to keep them busy for a long time.

Brandi sits inside the fully-equipped van located on the deck of NOAA Ship RON BROWN.
Brandi from ETL works with the LiDAR equipment mounted on the van.
L to R: Brandi, Taniel, and Scott from NOAA’s Environmental Technology Lab (ETL).

Travel Log

R&R on NOAA Ship BROWN

In the evenings many of the scientific members as well as crew members enjoy playing games or cards, reading, or doing needlepoint. However the primary form of entertainment on the BROWN is watching videos. There is a big screen TV in the lounge. Crew member Mike puts out a schedule for the week of the videos that will be shown each night so you can plan ahead. He has hundreds and hundreds to choose from! Crew member Dave opens the ship store for us to buy popcorn or candy. The profits made at the store help to purchase new videos.

Temoshok 10-16-01 tvlounge
Scientists and crew members relax in the BROWN’s TV lounge.

Question of the day: Why is it important for all the “portholes” (windows) on the ship to be covered during the night?

Keep in touch,
Jane

 

Posted on

Jane Temoshok, October 11, 2001

NOAA Teacher at Sea
Jane Temoshok
Onboard NOAA Ship Ronald H. Brown
October 2 – 24, 2001

Mission: Eastern Pacific Investigation of Climate Processes
Geographical Area: Eastern Pacific
Date: October 11, 2001

Latitude: 4 ºS
Longitude: 95 ºW
Air Temp: 21.0 ºC
Sea Temp: 19.0 ºC
Sea Wave: 1 – 2 ft.
Swell Wave: 3 – 4 ft.
Visibility: 10 miles
Cloud cover: 8/8

Science Log

Clouds

Today I met with meteorologist Dr, Taneil Uttal from ETL (Environmental Technology Lab) in Boulder, Colorado. She is head of a group that has done cloud studies in the Arctic. On this trip one of the things Dr. Uttal wants to determine is how similar marine clouds are to Arctic clouds. To do this she and her associate Duane Hazen use radiometers and radar which are all packed into a trailer. The whole trailer is on the deck of the RON BROWN. Think of the trailer as a big package of instruments. Duane’s job is to keep the machinery running. In the photo you can see the radar antennae on top of the trailer. It is there to measure the electromagnetic radiation at a certain frequency.

Dr. Taneil Uttal from ETL (Environmental Technology Lab) in Boulder, Colorado.
Dr. Taneil Uttal from ETL (Environmental Technology Lab) in Boulder, Colorado.
Dr. Uttal's associate, Duane Hazen.
Dr. Uttal’s associate, Duane Hazen.
Dr. Uttal and Duane Hazen use radiometers and radar which are all packed into a trailer.
Dr. Uttal and Duane Hazen use radiometers and radar which are all packed into a trailer.
In the photo you can see the radar antennae on top of the trailer. It is there to measure the electromagnetic radiation at a certain frequency.
In the photo you can see the radar antennae on top of the trailer. It is there to measure the electromagnetic radiation at a certain frequency.

Here is how Dr. Uttal explains what’s going on:

What is a cloud?
________________

A cloud is gazillions of tiny water droplets or ice crystals floating together up in the sky. Some clouds make rain and snow. Some clouds do not. In EPIC we are looking at both kinds of clouds.

What is a Radiometer?
_____________________

Think of a pokemon which has a special power that no other pokemon has. There are many things in the world around us that are just like that. For instance tiny droplets of water floating in the air are beaming certain energies that only water droplets have. If we know what the water droplet energy is like (and we do!), we can measure it and find out how much water there is in a cloud. A radiometer is a special instrument that we have here on the RON BROWN for measuring the special energy of a water droplet so we always know how much water is in the clouds over the ship. The energy of a water droplet can be named by how fast it is. A water droplet has three energies, 20 GHz, 32 GHz and 90 GHz. A GHz is 1,000,000,000 cycles per second.

What is a radar?
_________________

A radar is different from a radiometer because instead of looking for natural energy from something like a water droplet, it beams out its own energy, bounces it off of things in the sky (like water droplets in a cloud), and measures the reflected energy. By looking at the reflected energy, the radar can tell you things about a cloud that are different then what the radiometer tells you. It can tell you about how high a cloud is, how big the droplets are, and how fast the droplets are falling. The radar energy is 35 GHz.

What do you get when you look up with a radar and a radiometer?
_______________________________________________________________

When you put the data from a radar and radiometer together, you can figure out even more things, like how many cloud droplets there are, where the water is located in the cloud, and get an even better guess of how big the droplets are.

What does all this information tell you?
________________________________________

Right now people do not know very much about how clouds reflect sunlight from the sun, reflect warmth that is coming up from the earth, and change things like the temperature on the surface where we live. These things will change depending all the cloud height, how much water it has, how big the droplets are, and how fast they are falling. In EPIC, we want to know which kinds of clouds might make the ocean warmer, and which might make the ocean colder. This can have a big effect on where fish and other ocean animals might want to live and what kind of weather happens over the ocean.

Dr. Uttal is a scientist on board but she is also a mother and wife back in Colorado. Taniel and her husband Rusty, have 2 children – Kalvin, 6th grader at Baseline Middle School and Miranda, a 4th grader at Flatirons Elementary School.

Travel Log

Today I spent time on “the bridge” of the ship. This is the area that controls all the functions of the ship. The captain and his officers are responsible for all that goes on, much like the principal of the school is in charge. The best view can be had from the bridge and there are video cameras that look out over all the decks. The highlight was seeing a pod of porpoises swimming nearby. So graceful! I’m going to keep my eye out for whales.

Question of the Day: What is the fastest creature living in the sea?

Keep in touch,
Jane