Sorry for the long delay between posts. It has been somewhat of a busy week for me and I've had a number of other "chores" to work on. Much has happened with OWLeS since I last posted. We had 5 research flights in 4 days into lake-effect storms last week alone, as many as we had all of December! There were even 2 flights in one day, during one of which I got the privilege of flying in the 2nd seat. That meant that I got to tell the pilot where and how high to fly. So needless to say, myself and everyone else here have been tired and exhausted - getting up at 4 AM several times during the week was not on my original list of "things to do" before I came to NY, but we make the best of it.
Today (Monday) was a down day, meaning we were not collecting any data...which makes sense given that there are no lake-effect storms going on at the moment in our area. For me, down days like this are usually spent getting other stuff done. This past week, I've been working on editing a paper that we are trying to get published in one of the atmospheric science journals. I've also been plotting data from each of our flights and putting them online so other people associated with OWLeS can see them. I'm also in one class this spring, which started today, so eventually I will have homework and readings to do for that. On top of all this, I still have my own master's degree research to finish up - I haven't been able to work on any of that since November!
But instead of doing lots of work today, I helped give King Air tours to the undergraduate students from some of the other colleges involved in OWLeS - Millersville University, SUNY-Oswego, and Hobart and William Smith. These tours were more in-depth than the open house that we had back in December. I decided it was a good time to snap a number of photos of the airplane that I've been meaning to get - ones showing more of the instruments so that I can tell you a little bit about what each instrument does.
As promised, here is just a little bit about the airplane I've been flying in during the OWLeS project!
I've mentioned in previous posts that many different types of research tools and instruments are being used in OWLeS to make measurements of the atmosphere while lake-effect snow storms are taking place. The main contribution from the University of Wyoming is our own research aircraft, the King Air. This means that the majority of the work I am doing during the project is related to the aircraft, which includes flying on it during IOPs!
The Aircraft Itself
The King Air is a small twin-engine airplane outfitted with various meteorological instrumentation and has been used in many research projects over the last 36 years. It has been all over the United States, down to the Caribbean, to Finland, and most recently to England, just to name a few locations. Most of the instruments or sensors on the airplane make fairly common
measurements, like temperature, air pressure, wind speed/direction, and
humidity. There are other less-common sensors that measure the size of
cloud droplets and the amount of liquid water in the air.
