Thursday, Nov. 2, 2006

R/V MIRAI

"mirror-like ocean surface"

Fine
Light rain was found in the night

Observations:

All instruments work well.
Snow White radiosonde was released around 11:00 am. Weak (<3m/s) easterlies prevailed whole day, and there was a signficant diurnal cycle of SST with maximum over 29.5 degC. There were no siginificant echos (Fig. 1) and ocean surface was like mirror, that reflect shallow convections on the surface (photo-1). Lifted condensation level increased, while precipitable water vapor decreased to lower 50's mm. Satellite cloud images show the existance of cloud clusters in the northern area of MIRAI.

Remarks:

From today, we will have a seminar presented by not only researchers but also graduate students every other day. For the first day, a graduate student (photo-2), who was selected by the random selection called as Amida-kuji, presented his research entitled "Observations of the clouds and aerosols, and the study on the mechanism of cloud development". Actually, he talked about not only science but also his ship's life (!). We enjoyed it much.