Monday, July 4, 2005

Arrived in San Jose on 7/3. Went to hangar at 9AM on 7/4 to participate in coordination meeting with Robbie, Jeff, Ed, Gerry, and Mike. After discussion, we decided the best plan was to plan a test-coordination mission with the ER-2. We would target a line of showers that normally form off the west coast of Costa Rica when there is easterly flow. We would fly a shortened diamond pattern and a portion of the microphysics module (from 10,000-14,000 ft).

The meteorological situation showed TS Dora south of Acapulco, near the coast. It was expected to parallel the coast just offshore, and not be a target. Strong (20-30 kt) northeasterly shear was southeast of Dora, extending from the Yucatan southwest across central America into the E Pac. There was a blowup of convection over Panama, but that was not associated with any wave and no genesis was anticipated. So no genesis targets in the region. There was convection over the windward islands with impressive upper- level outflow, but it was forecast to move into the SE Caribbean Sea, an unfavorable location for development climatologically. Tropical Depression #3 was just pulling N off the Yucatan peninsula, and there was a potential for a tasking of 42 into this system, even though the system looked like it was being sheared from the southwest and did not look likely to intensify much. N42RF was tasked for a SFMR/fix mission the following day, takeoff at 1330 UTC takeoff. It would then either return to San Jose or recover in Key West and return to San Jose the following day, so we planned to fly the coordination test flight with N43RF and the ER-2 on Tuesday. The anticipation was that the wave in the eastern Caribbean might provide a target by Thursday or Friday.

Rob Rogers
HRD Field Program director