Thursday, Nov. 16, 2006

R/V MIRAI

"symptom"

Cloudy, partly fine, and sometimes rain at night
While easterly (5m/sec) prevailed in daytime, northerly and then westerly were found at night accompanied with the passage of cloud systems.
Wave height was 1.5 m.

Observations:

Radiosonde observation, CTD casting, and other routine observations were carried out.
In the early morning, it was covered with clouds, but they passed away to west by noon.
Amplitude of diurnal cycle of SST was small (maximum 29.2 degC, minimum 29.0 degC).
From the late afternoon, precipitation echoes were lined along NNE-SSW and moved to west-north-west. Such rain bands successively developed and moved westward with interval of about 150 km (Fig. 1).

Remarks:

Sattelite-based cloud images show the cloud systems covers over the entire equatorial Indian Ocean. As shown in Fig. 1, precipitation echo developed along the line and each echo has a peak over 48 dBZ with maximum height higher than 15 km. Therefore, larger-scale cloud systems are expected to be developed and organized.
Today, we had 10th MIRAI seminar. A researcher explained how to study the water cycle using isotope of the water as well as his land observation experience (photo-1).
Photo-2 shows the moment of launching the baloon by ship officer, as he was near the launcher container for another task, and we requested him to push the button to release.
Finally, two photos related to the boat/ship were put here.
Today, emergency drinking water, that is stored in a life boat, is replaced (photo-3). At that time, we could see that fishery boat is passing by near the MIRAI (photo-4).