Today is the first day of the RAINEX experiment and its partnership with IFEX-Late. All primary RAINEX P.I.'s arrived in Miami at the end of last week, and the NRL P-3 arrived in Tampa on Sunday. The ELDORA on the NRL P-3 has a broken transmitter that will require a couple of days for repair. N43RF is ready to fly, while N42RF will be undergoing IWRAP install starting today. The plan is to have N42RF ready to fly by Wednesday.

As for the weather, Tropical Storm Irene continues to move toward the north, and a turn toward the northeast and acceleration is anticipated today. This is not a target for IFEX nor RAINEX. Tropical Depression 10 has been sheared apart by southwesterly upper-level winds, leaving an exposed low-level circulation (Fig. 1). It has been downgraded to a dissipated system. The remnants of T.D.10 are expected to continue moving toward the west and west-northwest, but no regeneration is expected anytime soon. Elsewhere, conditions are unfavorable for any development in any region within reach of the P-3's.

The plan now calls for a RAINEX test flight on Wednesday, after the transmitter on the NRL P-3 has been repaired and hopefully N42RF is ready to fly. In the event all three planes can fly, there will be a portion of the mission devoted to flight-level intercomparisons, and then an area of convection will be targeted. Two patterns will be flown: one where all three P-3's fly in trail to intercompare the tail radars, and another pattern where the P-3's fly in a configuration similar to what would be flown in a hurricane (i.e., N43RF and N42RF on one side of the convection, with N42RF about 100 km from the convection, and NRL P-3 on the other side of the convection).

Rob Rogers
HRD Field Program director