| Aircraft Commander | Michelle Finn |
| Flight Director | Marty Mayeaux |
| Dropsonde | Mike Black |
| AVAPS | Al Goldstien Dale Carpenter |
Figure 1. Planned track of N49. Small circles along the flight track
are dropsonde locations.
Mission Plan :
This mission was tasked by NHC as the 3rd in a series of synoptic surveillance flights around TS Fay. Prior to the flight, Fay was approaching west-central Cuba from the south and heading north over Cuba to a forecast landfall over west Florida in a couple of days. Fay had maximum winds of 50 kt but was forecast to strengthen over the Florida straits the following day. The planned track for the mission, which was hand drawn by NHC (Fig. 1) would sample the high pressure system to the east of Florida, head south and fly between Haiti and Cuba, head to the west south of Fay before heading to the Gulf of Mexico to sample the eastern portion of an approaching trough in the northern Gulf. The plan was to release 27 dropsondes along the proposed track. During the preflight briefing we decided to extend the most NW portion of our flight to the west by 2 degrees and add 2 more dropsondes there. CARCAH and NHC were consulted and agreed that this would be deirable.
|
Aircraft: N49RF Altitude: FL410-450 Proposed takeoff: 18/0530Z | |||
| DROP # | LAT (d m) | LON (d m) | |
| 1 | 31 00 | 78 00 | |
| 2 | 31 00 | 75 30 | |
| 3 | 31 00 | 73 00 | |
| 4 | 29 30 | 73 00 | |
| 5 | 28 00 | 73 00 | |
| 6 | 28 00 | 75 00 | |
| 7 | 28 00 | 77 00 | |
| 8 | 26 15 | 77 00 | |
| 9 | 24 30 | 77 00 | |
| 10 | 23 15 | 75 30 | |
| 11 | 22 00 | 74 00 | |
| 12 | 20 30 | 73 30 | |
| 13 | 19 00 | 74 00 | |
| 14 | 19 00 | 76 30 | |
| 15 | 19 00 | 79 00 | |
| 16 | 19 30 | 81 30 | |
| 17 | 20 00 | 84 00 | |
| 18 | 21 30 | 85 30 | |
| 19 | 23 00 | 87 00 | |
| 20 | 23 45 | 85 30 | |
| 21 | 24 30 | 84 00 | |
| 22 | 26 00 | 84 00 | |
| 23 | 26 00 | 86 30 | |
| 24 | 26 00 | 89 00 | |
| 25 | 28 30 | 89 00 | |
| 26 | 28 30 | 87 00 | |
| 27 | 28 30 | 85 00 | |
| Take off | Landing
| MacDill AFB, FL | 05:15 UTC
| MacDill AFB, FL | 13:45 UTC
| | ||
Mission Summary :
N49 took off from MacDill at 0515 UTC and headed east over Florida to the western Atlantic to begin our mission. We dropped a total of 32 dropsondes, 3 of which were backups to sondes that failed. Drop # 2 was a fast wall and only the data from the backup was transmitted. Drop # 3 did not report winds and, again, the data from a backup was transmitted. From then on, all of the sondes were good until drop # 17 that had only a few wind measurements. The backup was again used for data transmission.
Figure 2 shows the synoptic maps of the observations at the mandatory levels. During the flight we traversed a few areas of moderate convection, but did not experience any significant turbulence. We landed back at MacDill about 1345 UTC. The final G-IV mission was scheduled for 1730 UTC on that same day.
Problems :
Besides, the 3 sondes already mentioned, very few problems occurred during the flight. There were a few failures of transmission of the TEMPDROP message but thanks to X-chat capability with CARCAH, these were easily found and the data was retransmitted successfully. There were a couple of problems running the ASPEN software in which the heights were not coded properly or were missing. Reprocessing these two sondes resulted in the corrected data being transmitted and was confirmed by CARCAH.
Michael Black
Mission Data :
09/02/08
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