Wednesday, Nov. 15, 2006

R/V MIRAI

"slight increase of shallow convections"

Fine
Easterly (5m/sec) was dominant, and wave height was 1.5m.

Observations:

Radiosonde observation, CTD casting, and other continuous observations have been conducted.
Snow-white sonde was launched at 1110 LST.
From this morning, shallow convections and congestus clouds often developed in the daytime (photo-1). In the evening, light rain was observed on the MIRAI. Most cloud systems moved westward in accordance with general lower tropospheric easterlies.
Intake SST reached only 29.8 degC at maximum.
Satellite-based cloud images still show the existance of large cloud area around and east of 70E.

Remarks:

Today, we had 9th seminar (photo-2). ISAR (Infrared Sea surface temperature Autonomous Radiometer) from University of Miami was the main subject of today's talk. He is also the man who developed the SOAR (Shipboard Oceanic and Atmospheric Radiation measurement) system, that has been adopted as standard radiation package on the MIRAI.

Photos 3 and 4 shows another side of observation. Some of researchers enjoy the brilliant star at night (photo-3). When the MIRAI call at new port, or, collaborate with other ships, we often do a "plate exchange" in memory. Those plates are put on the wall (photo-4), and now we have three spaces for that.