[Oracles-flight-planning] Planning for routine flights

[Steven Howell]

Hi all,

Having sent out a sample routine flight plan last September with no responses, I figure I'll try again to get the conversation going. I've attached the plan I sent before, but also want to illustrate the tradeoffs between latitude and time surveying.

I'm assuming a high altitude transit to a target latitude, then a survey to the west at varying altitudes, more or less like the attached plan. It takes about 3 hours to get to 15 S and back, and an additional 12 minutes (round trip) for each additional degree north. So we lose an hour of survey time by choosing 10 S rather than 15 S. During the survey, I assume an average flight speed of 136 m/s. That reflects time spent low and climbing, when the P-3 slows by 15 m/s.

My original plan is for 15 S, but the 600 mbar wind / IR movie makes it seem like 15 is often at the very southern edge of the outflow, where it is turning south. It seems to me that going farther north might be worthwhile, but it'll mean long transits. I wanted to superimpose the plots below on the movie, but didn't come up with an easy way to do it.

The first map below shows the distances surveyed in 8 hour routine flights. The second is for 9 hour flights. Given the weight problems we've heard so much about, I don't know whether 9 hour flights are possible.

Steve




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On Sep 29, 2015, at 3:23 PM, Steven Howell <showell at soest.hawaii.edu> wrote:

> Hi,
> 
> I was going to bring this up during the telecon, but after 2 hours I decided to simply write it out instead.
> 
> We agreed at the meeting that what we learned during the dry run should be used to evaluate possible routine flight plans. We might as well do that while our memories are fresh. In the attached document, I've listed possible criteria for comparing candidate flight plans and applied some of them (the easy ones) to the routine flight plan from the proposal.
> 
> Is this a productive way to start? I'd welcome suggestions for changing the criteria, for modifications to the flight plan, and for entirely different flight plans. I need help trying to figure out how to gauge whether the flight plan was useful on any particular day, given the meteorology and aerosols estimated as well as practical from satellite and model measurements.
> 
> I'm willing to make a few more candidate flight plans for us to evaluate. What I have in mind are:
> 1) Essentially the proposal plan but avoiding Angolan airspace and spending another half hour above the BB plume, sacrificing an in-situ leg.
> 2) Extend to a 10 hour plan.
> 3) Move to 12 S.
> 
> Are these worth looking at?
> 
> Thanks,
> Steve
> 
> 
> <routine_flight_criteria_SH.docx>
> -- 
> Steven Howell, University of Hawaii, Department of Oceanography
> 
> "Irrigation of the land with seawater desalinated by fusion power is ancient. It's called 'rain'." -- Michael McClary, in alt.fusion
> 
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> oracles-flight-planning at espo.nasa.gov
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-- 
Steven Howell, University of Hawaii, Department of Oceanography

“There is at the back of all our lives an abyss of light, more blinding and unfathomable than any abyss of darkness; and it is the abyss of actuality, of existence, of the fact that things truly are, and that we are ourselves incredibly and sometimes almost incredulously real.” (G. K. Chesterton)
from http://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/