[Oracles-flight-planning] Planning for routine flights

Sat May 14 08:13:58 PDT 2016

Rob et al,

   Would it make any sense to draft a canonical  “lagrangian” flight plan in terms of plume axis? As the plume meanders from day to day, so does the canonical flight plan.

      Arlindo

On May 13, 2016 at 7:33:09 PM, Robert Wood (robwood2 at uw.edu<mailto:robwood2 at uw.edu>) wrote:

Hi Jens, Lenny,

I haven't had a chance yet to chime in on the routine plans that Steve sent, but I agree with the concern that a considerable portion of the flight is spent just transiting north to the start point. Given that we think 15S might be too far south to capture the higher loadings nearer the E-W axis of the plume, we might be looking at 12S as the most desirable latitude.

I think the real utility of the routine plan is to give large scale (regional+global) modelers a well-defined set of well-sampled locations along a transect with which to compare averaged model output. This allows the comparison to be more meaningful than simply a case study. That's what we did with VOCALS (attached Wyant paper), and we think it was useful. Now, this doesn't require the transect to be a straight line, so it is worth considering Lenny's idea of relaxing the idea that the transect needs to be an E-W line along a particular latitude parallel. It might be more optimal to use a line that simply heads NW from WVB as far as is possible. Or it could be a diagonal to 12S then a westward turn (assuming there is sufficient time). The key is that we do want to sample across some meaningful gradients in both cloud and aerosol properties.

Steve: would it be possible to make a map based on your calculations of what this might look like in terms of range?

What do others think about the idea?

Regards

Rob

On 5/13/2016 11:46 AM, Jens Redemann wrote:
See response below. Thanks, Lenny.

Jens

On 5/12/2016 6:58 PM, Leonhard Pfister wrote:

(1) I will ask Pat if he can draw these on the imagery.  If he can draw the met fields, we can certainly draw flight plans.

These plans are easy enough that no kml file is needed, since three or four points define each plan.

That's great. Thanks for asking Pat.

(2) I understand the logic of the east-west leg -- the idea being to follow the BB plume as it descends into the cloud.

And yes, the climo winds, even down to 850mb show easterlies to 10-15S, with bending occurring between those two

latitudes as Steve says.  We are spending a lot of time going northward and southward near the coast, though.  Is this

productive?.  Should we consider heading NW and then eastward following the curve of the 600mb flow (and then retracing that

backwards)?

That's an interesting idea. I have no preference. The basic idea was to give the climate modelers something repetitive for model testing. I am not sure if a constant-latitude leg is essential for that. Maybe Rob and Paquita can chime in here?!

Jens

L.

On 5/12/16 5:12 PM, Jens Redemann wrote:
Hi Steve,

thanks for doing this - I finally had some time to look at this. You have put a lot of thought into this and I am not sure what the best way for a productive discussion is. My gut feeling is that the most productive way (because it receives the most diverse feedback) to move forward is to discuss this during the STM in June, as part of the flight planning activities. I am attaching a preliminary agenda, in which I scheduled this discussion under your leadership for Saturday morning (the whole agenda is still in flux, but the list of topics should be near-final). As you can see, the major push for the June in-person STM will be to discuss flight planning and plans. We could provide a preview in our May telecon next week?!

By way of upfront commentary, I think my strong preference would be for routine flight plans that reach far out into the SE Atlantic. I wonder if we could task somebody to overlay the pattern you drew up onto the satellite imagery or even some Worldview combination of RGB and AOD retrievals. That could be quite useful. If you send out a kmz or digital file with the coordinates, maybe we could ask Lenny to take a crack at this?!

I think your scoring of the flight plan for what you call mechanical characteristics may change a bit as we learn more form the instrument PI's about their instrument preferred mode(s) of operation - this will be part of the homework for next week and the STM - I am hoping to get to that homework assignment tomorrow.

Thanks again for spurring the discussion,

Jens

On 5/10/2016 8:51 PM, Steven Howell wrote:
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

On Sep 29, 2015, at 3:23 PM, Steven Howell <mailto:showell at soest.hawaii.edu> <showell at soest.hawaii.edu><mailto: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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 Arlindo M. da Silva, Jr.
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