Sunday, Nov. 12, 2006

R/V MIRAI

"mop"

Fine in the morning, but mostly cloudy.
In the evening, it became rain. Wind changed its direction from easterly to west-north-westerly, later it again changed to southerly. Intake-SST showed strong diurnal cycle with the peak of 29.8 degC.

Observations:

Radiosonde observation every 3 hours, and 6-hourly CTD, and other continous observation have been conducted. Snow White sonde was launched at 1100 LST, while two video sondes were succesisvely launched at 1806 LST and 2106 LST, respectively.
According to the satellite cloud images, there exist two large cloud systems near the MIRAI, one is around the Maldives islands, and the other is just south of the MIRAI.

Remarks:

In the evening, since the cloud cluster that developed south-east of the MIRAI moved to north-west (photo-1), we tried to launch the video sonde two times in the same large system. We might be able to obtain the different types of distribution of the precipitation particles.
We had 7th MIRAI seminar. Today, a research group, who conduct the chrolophyll measurement, introduced their lab's activity as well as some recent progress of the their research (photos-2, 3).
Finally, we'd like to introduce tiny but important goods.
Photo-4 shows the moment of the sonde launch. However, as you see, there is a "line" at the launcher. Since sometimes baloon is stopped inside the launcher, the Captain requested the No. 1 Oiler to make a special goods. As a result, we have now a special extensible "mop" (photo-5), so that we can easily push the baloon to throw out.